Dave Gerhardt

Hey I'm Dave Gerhardt. I created Exit Five, which has turned into the top community for B2B marketing professionals. Before starting Exit Five I had a 10 year career in marketing and grew from PR intern to CMO. I even once had hair! My wife says I'm more handsome now though, and she's quite pretty so that means a lot -- but the internet just boxes me in as the typical bald guy tech bro. So oh look, another bald tech guy writing on LinkedIn! whoopty freaking do.

Anyway. Where was I... OH. Receipts! I wanted to talk about receipts, because in a world of fluff and online influencers, I actually have some receipts and I want to tell you about them here because it signals power, credibility, and makes it seem like I'm super rich, so: I used to be pretty good at marketing, and my work as a marketer played a key role (at least I think so) in helping two software companies to successful exits: Drift for $1B+ and Privy for $100M+. I certainly helped the founders make a bunch of money, and I was able to comfortably purchase a brand new Toyota Sienna minivan for my family in 2021.

Today I spend my time working on Exit Five, and it's actually been super fun and given me a bunch of purpose. We're a team of six full-time team members now, and we have a private online community and host in-person events around the world. Plus there's a popular podcast and newsletter for marketers. We reach something like 20 MILLION marketers with our content every year, and we've got a pretty special thing going on. I hope to keep it going. You can learn more about it all at exitfive.com.

I spent most of my life in the Boston area but now live in the woods in Vermont with my wife, two kids, two cats, and one dog.

You can reach me at dave@exitfive.com if you want, but TBD if I reply. Depends on the message. But please don't send me any more swag or books. But if for whatever reason you do want to send me something, I play the ProV1x golf ball and like the low numbers.

PS. Find my podcast “The Dave Gerhardt Show” on Spotify

Founder & CEO

Exit Five is a media company focused on B2B marketing. We help B2B marketers build successful careers through our content and community. Learn more at exitfive.com

The CEO should put the Product team and Marketing team together. 

In lock step. 

To drive momentum and success for the company. 

I see so much about Sales and Marketing. 

Not enough about Product and Marketing. 

There should be a vision. And a roadmap. And regular launches. Some small. Some big. And this becomes the operating system for the company. 

You can CREATE momentum for your company by doing this. Deadlines drive actions. 

These regular launches give Marketing and Sales regular opportunities to talk to new customers. 

The CEO should be in the middle of this.

PS. If this topic lands with you and you're a CMO: we've been running a super secret group for CMOs / VP Marketing doing $25M+ ARR at Exit Five over the last few months and we're now accepting new members. Community is more important now than ever and it's all about who is in the room. We have curated the right room for you. If you want a peer group like this you can apply for a spot here: tinyurl.com/23h2c5eh

Founder: Exit Five. Community Builder. Former CMO. Building the top community for B2B marketers right now at exitfive.com

I didn't want my team to publish this talk. It was too good. Should have only been for the memory of the people that went to Drive this year.

But I'm also a marketer and understand the power of social media and free content, so fine. 

We published my pal Harry Dry's talk from Drive 2025 yesterday, and if you missed it he gave a masterclass in storytelling.

The long lost art of conflict and emotion in the world of AI, PLEASE GO LISTEN TO THIS MAN.

The first line of this clip says it all "You should know so much about your category you could write a book on it."

You're not creating a category to fit into Gartner or G2. You are creating a category because you are literally inventing a new of way of doing things!

That's the opportunity.

I'll put the recording in the comments (audio only)

Founder: Exit Five. The top community for B2B marketers.

Tom Wentworth

incident.io

Chief Marketing Officer

RevSure AI

Advisor

ai12z

dotCMS

Independent member of the board of directors for open source hybrid CMS provider

Board Member

Recorded Future

Acquired by Mastercard for $2.65b

I led the global marketing team at Recorded Future for five years through the acquisition by MasterCard. Recorded Future was at $350m+ ARR, a high-growth cybersecurity company focused on securing our world with intelligence.

- Grew ARR from $90m to over $350m and consistently sourced 50%+ of New Logo Qualified Pipeline (over $500m in total)
- Moved into the Leader position in multiple Forrester and Frost + Sullivan analyst reports
- Scaled the annual Predict customer conference to four locations with over 1,000 attendees 
- Launched Recorded Future News and its two flagship media properties: The Record, one of the largest cybersecurity news sites, and Click Here, a National Murrow Award-winning podcast that consistently ranks in the Top 5 Tech News podcast category

Acquia

Acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1b

I rejoined Acquia in early 2019 to lead Product Marketing. During my time there, we acquired three companies to round out our Digital Experience product portfolio and introduced simplified product packaging to articulate our capabilities across multiple product lines (Drupal Cloud, Marketing Cloud). 

I left after the Vista acquisition.

SVP Product Marketing

Drift

Jebbit

Acquired by Vista Equity Partners (spot a trend yet?)

Underscore VC

Altair RapidMiner

I was responsible for global go-to-market strategy (100% product-led growth), product marketing, and communications at RapidMiner, a low code machine learning pioneer.

- Tripled ARR and transformed a classic top-down enterprise selling model into bottoms-up product-led growth.
- Led RapidMiner's placement as a Leader in the 2018 Forrester Wave for Predictive Analytics and into the overall top spot in the 2018 Gartner Data Science Platforms Magic Quadrant.

High growth SaaS executive with expertise in both enterprise product-led and enterprise GTM models. I infrequently post advice on tech marketing at https://tomwentworth.com and used to host a podcast called Scaleup Marketing.

I’m on the marketing team at Recorded Future, a $300m+ ARR, high growth cyber security company focused on securing our world with intelligence. 

I'm in the best shape of my life at 53. 

My traction on LinkedIn has slowed and Dave Gerhardt says we can write anything on LinkedIn so here we go. 

I hit rock bottom in 2012. Years of relentless travel to fabulous places like Dallas with Neil Leshner, Charlotte with Tom Beriau, and Kansas City with David Maffei and Chris Crombie nearly crushed me. Every night was the same: fly into the city, grab dinner with the customer at the most expensive steak place, hit up a bar afterwards, consume another 1000 calories of beer, go to bed around 1-2am. Get up at 7. Do this almost every week for ~15 years. 

I looked and felt awful. My bloodwork was even worse than my pictures. I had a pre-diabetic A1C and cholesterol through the roof. 

I had enough in 2012 and lost a bunch of weight. But the damage was done. A few years later, I got officially diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and put on a bunch of medicine. I was doing okay, but not great. 

Everything changed in 2023 when I got put on Ozempic. I'm not a doctor so no one should listen to me about anything, but GLP-1s are a MIRACLE drug. After being on Ozempic for a year or so and then moved over to Mounjaro I'm healthier than ever. I've lost weight, yes. But the most important thing is my A1C is back to normal levels. I'll always have T2D, but GLP1s keep it totally under control. And outside of T2D, I've had multiple friends lose 80+ pounds on GLP1s. (Dave Scalera, with his permission) MIRACLE drug and I hope someday soon they are available to a lot more people (and made much cheaper!) 

The only downside to GLP1s is that weight loss brings muscle loss with it. So my doctor told me to start working out, which I did. And about a year ago, I became obsessed with it. 

Today I cosplay Sam Sulek (IYKYK) and do my pretend bodybuilding workouts for an hour in the morning 7 days a week. I can bench 275 and squat 250+ which is a lot, especially for, ugh, someone my age. I wake up between 5-5:30 in the morning, jump in the cold plunge for 3 minutes (s/o David Maffei), get on the treadmill, and lift heavy shit. Every morning. As Sal Scilingo says, the excuse factory is closed. 

I feel better than I did in my 20s. I'm also much more protective of my free time these days. Work travel is a necessity, but when I travel I'm sticking with my routine. I try and book hotels with a nice gym or a Planet Fitness nearby. I won't travel to optional stuff like Dreamforce or Inbound or all the marketing "retreats" I get invited to (no matter how Instagrammable they look). 

I go to bed at 9pm almost every night. Non-negotiable. I'll go to the work event, but I'm leaving in time to get at least 8 hours of sleep a night. I'd like to stay out, trust me. But I've learned lessons the hard way. 

Okay that's enough for today. Please like and subscribe so I can break my streak of LinkedIn posts no one is reading or engaging with.

CMO @ incident.io 🔥 | Board Member | iOS Developer

Just rolled out a new process that will let anyone at incident.io request a 1-1 ABM campaign from Slack. Give us a domain and a bit about the account, and a few minutes later you'll get:

Landing page
Emails
and as of a new minutes ago... ads

100% automated. 

Wild times.

Ben Cope Jessica DeLuca David Vella Chloe Livesey

Unlimited vacation is a the ultimate HR benefit scam. 

I’m on vacation this week, puposely avoiding having to cook. At incident.io we have real vacation days. Not fake “unlimited” days that no one takes and only serve to keep unpaid vacation time off the CFOs balance sheet.

The last four companies I worked at all had “unlimited” vacation. In my experience, “unlimited” really means that 10% of the team will abuse the policy, 25% will take the normal amount of time off and the rest will take less than two weeks. 

Real vacation days encourage employees to, you know, actually take a vacation. Can’t use all the days? You can sell some of them back to the company.

Happy Thanksgiving yall!

The 🐐Dave Kellogg wrote a post over the weekend you should read called "How To Navigate the Pipeline Crisis". I'll link it up in the comments. 

Dave post was a riff on a larger idea from Exit Five that "nothing works anymore". 

Well, there *is* something that always works and is the magic cure to the pipeline crisis: a truly differentiated product. 

Every marketing channel works if you've got a great product. Are explosive growth companies like Wiz Cyera Lovable Cursor etc. great at marketing? Of course. But their brand was built on the back of their products, not a marketing campaign. 

Could the #7 vendor in the cloud security market show up at RSA with the WizMart booth and pull it off? Nope. 

This isn't to say that marketing is easy for the companies that are dominating with product, but it does mean that they can make much bigger bets in every channel because the have the brand behind it.

Yes, it's possible win with great marketing and an average product. But I think that's harder than ever these with so many great products in every single B2B market.

Maybe the pipeline crisis is actually a product crisis?

Always enjoying linking up with Dave Gerhardt + the Exit Five team. 

Here's me trying to explain the I think taste + creativity has a bigger impact on marketing than AI adoption. At least for now :)

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