Season 6, Episode 3: Mark Abramowitz, CMO at Dataiku: Global perspectives, people-first leadership, and AI

Ali 
Mark, thank you very much for joining us today. 
 
Mark 
Thanks, Ali. Great to be here. Seriously, very excited to be here. 
 
Ali 
Thank you. Well, well, first of all, I want to help our listeners get to know you a little bit as a person, uh, in this first episode. So could you tell me a storey from your childhood that has shaped who you are today? 
 
Mark 
Of course. And it's pretty significant and easy, easy to pick one out, this one. So Compared to your typical American or even typical American CMO, I've got this different worldview really shaped by travelling, um, but also being born not in the United States. So I was born in South Africa where my family had been living for a few generations actually, and I made the move from Cape Town to Long Island. And so with that, I grew up with family kind of all, all over the world, whether it be New York, Philadelphia, London, Tel Aviv, Johannesburg, and was fortunate as a child, young adults, depending on how you, how you split those, those ages to travel to all of those places. And so I feel like that really instilled kind of an interest in the world, in world history, in people from different cultures, and just foundationally, I think, is an element in kind of a through line, even in choices I've made in my life. Kind of foundational in this different perspective on where I started and kind of where I've ended up. 
 
Ali 
I love that. I mean, I'm fascinated by people who have had the opportunity to grow up in lots and lots of different environments like it sounds like you have. Do you find that today you meet and see people in a very, very different way than maybe if you had grown up in one place? I mean, is there anything you lack from that as well? Do you feel like you haven't got a sense of home or anything else? 
 
Mark 
Interesting on both points. I think yes, it does give me an appreciation for people from different cultures and different backgrounds. And as we get into it, as an adult, I've lived in other countries. I spent a lot of time travelling and backpacking fresh out of college, which was super meaningful in a similar way of just like you meet people from all over the world and I think you end up learning to appreciate the person more so than like, "Oh, this category of people," or generalisations. I'm super focused on not making generalisations and treating people for who they are, not necessarily your preconceived notions of who they could be or should be. And then the grounding or sort of roots was actually less for me, but I also spent 5 years living in Australia and my kids were really young. They were 4 and 2, and we lived there for about 5 years. And so at that stage, it was like, well, where are their roots going to be? And which is Probably now we've lived in the same place in the Bay Area now for 10 years, but I always felt grounded in New York, but was also very eager to leave the East Coast once I got out of college. 
 
Mark 
And so it's just like, I love going to new places. My wife gets not annoyed, but like, she's like, we love this place. Can we go back to this place again and again? And as we plan family vacations, I very much am like, well, where new could we go? Where can we go and explore somewhere different? Yes, there are some favourites. We do go back, but I think we've imparted some of that in my kids by living abroad, living overseas as they were young kids to just a broader worldview. You know, it's very interesting in Australia where you look at a world map in North America or the US is not the centre of the map and subtle sort of thing that you see at the travel agency or the mall, but like Australia is in the centre or that part of the Pacific is the centre of the map and small thing, but very, very telling as to like the impact that that can have on kids. 
 
Ali 
Definitely. I mean, cartography alone is probably, it was many, many podcasts worth of an interesting conversation, I think, how we represent the world, how that shapes how we all see it. Were you happy? Were you excited to be moving around at the time? I mean, obviously you look back on it by the sounds of it very fondly, and there's a lot you're very grateful for, but at the time, did it feel like a strange experience? 
 
Mark 
No, I mean, just to be clear, I didn't live in all those places. That's where I got to visit. right? So it felt normal. Like, that's what you did, uh, in my family because the people I was visiting, like my parents' generation, they all grew up in the same town in Port Elizabeth or in Port Elizabeth in South Africa. So they all were used to like just walking to each other's houses. And so as they left South Africa for various reasons or different, they each left for slightly different reasons. It was a core element to, I think, their upbringing. To make sure that the next generation, even though we lived in different parts of the world, made connexions. And those connexions are still there today. Some people have moved around and we've obviously grown up and now do that on our own where we stay very, very much connected. And a lot of that goes back to those sort of child or early adult trips, visits, experiences that we had together are still paying dividends now. 
 
Ali 
Lovely. What were your dreams as a child then? What were, you know, you talked about the, the older generation wanting things for you. What was it that you wanted to be? 
 
Mark 
I mean, you know, this is where I quickly transition maybe to a very American point of view where growing up in New York at that time, like, I want to be a Yankee. I wanted so much to be a New York Yankee. When I, my family, we moved to New York, it was a time where the Yankees were thriving. This is to date myself a little bit, like in the late '70s with some amazing teams. And part of, I think, my Americanization or sort of assimilation into being American. I love baseball, still do love baseball. And I, you know, I wanted to be a Yankee. What a story. What a time to be a baseball fan. And, you know, my brother and I played a lot of baseball as kids trying to figure out where we fit. You know, yes, South Africa, my parents, they speak English, very westernised, you know, no massive cultural shift, but still, immigrant parents and they didn't know baseball or American, what their kids should be doing. And we threw ourselves into baseball and I don't know how long, you know, like certainly until I got to a little older, like I absolutely thought I could be a Yankee. 
 
Ali 
I love that. I mean, I have to admit as a Brit, I also know very little about baseball and I've had the fortune to be kind of immersed a little bit in the NFL, but baseball is something I still don't understand. The best sell that anyone's ever given me about baseball is that actually there's as much complexity and depth to it as there is cricket. And I, and I love cricket. So, um, yeah, it's definitely something I'd love to learn more about. Um, do you still play baseball now? Do you, do you play it or is there anything else you do to keep yourself energised? 
 
Mark 
Yeah, no, I'm probably, uh, not, not much baseball anymore. These days it's, it's just exercise that really keeps me grounded. There's, this is very local. There's a gym in my town where like you got 20 minutes spin on the bike, you do 20 minutes of weights and 20 minutes of yoga. And so in that hour you kind of get strong cardio, strong weight, and then you get to kind of do a little mindfulness. And that, that combination is really a focus for me of just the exercise is the thing that is the destressor, is as much the mental help as it is the physical. And it's, if the more I can do that, the better I feel. 
 
Ali 
It's so important, isn't it? What about other ways of kind of decompressing other aspects of culture that play a big part in your life? 
 
Mark 
There's a lot of reading. I love historical fiction, not surprisingly, science fiction. It connects a little bit to the world we live in from a business perspective now, from a futuristic AI sorts of things. Started to go quite a bit more to, um, it's not quite Broadway, but in the Bay Area there are these shows, they, they come on tour. And so one of my sons is really into theatre. So we started to do that quite a bit just to see different ways of these shows have been interpreted and like what is making, making its way around. And then just spending time with my family is really a reset for me as well. 
 
Ali 
Well, that's something that obviously repeatedly comes up as the 3 things that almost every CMO I speak to talks about is some kind of exercise of some sort, spending time with family and friends, and then whether it's music or reading or something else, there's some kind of intellectual stimulation away from the day job. 
 
Mark 
And let's not forget the dogs. 
 
Ali 
And the dogs who made themselves very well known at the start of the call. So what about advice though? What do you feel like you've learned that you would love to have learned earlier? Is there something you'd have told your younger self if you're able to have dinner with them now? 
 
Mark 
So this is something that it took me a while to get here. And I think in the progression of roles and responsibility and scope, what I've learned is it really is all about the people. And as I've grown as a leader, leading larger and larger teams, leadership or teams is part of the progression. But over the last probably, probably 5 years, I feel like I've really grown to really appreciate the— it's not about the contributions, about the people themselves, whether you are a leader or someone who's early in career, finding ways to connect with people in a like authentic, meaningful way. And as a younger self, certainly in enterprise software, I felt like it was about very much about me and how do I grow my career. And then you get to a certain— or I got to a certain point where it's those relationships that you build. It's not only at work, I think, as, as you also get to later stages in life, it's like those friends, the community, the, the interactions you have with the people are the things that you are going to remember more than— well, yes, some launches were amazing, but like, what was the process like and the people you worked with under stressful times, or And it's that experience. 
 
Mark 
That's how those bonds are created. And I think as I, particularly as I reflected on my most recent transition, the opportunity I had at ServiceNow to grow and lead a, a team of all over the world with diverse backgrounds and stages of career, I really was left with, I don't know where it came from, who said this, but how people and culture really do eat strategy. And like, if you can build in your personal life a circle of trusted friends that you get challenged by, but also you get sort of enriched by. And you can bring that into the workplace, whether they're on your team or not on your team, they're executives, they're early in career folks. Like there's moments that whether it's coaching or receiving feedback or mentoring, that are the things that really stand out to me as one of the, one of the things that, again, early in career, I I would not have thought that way. 
 
Ali 
We'll talk obviously more about your professional life in the next episode, but imagine that actually the world was very, very different and you had never gone into marketing in the first place. What else would you be doing right now in this parallel universe? 
 
Mark 
So I think that also has probably evolved over time, but right now, if I think about where I am and what And some of this is influenced by, by my wife, who is a teacher. I think I would be a teacher, particularly an elementary school teacher. She's been a teacher for, for many years, but one of the common themes at the various schools that she's worked at, and she is an elementary school teacher, is really the lack of male teachers at that age or in elementary school. As you get higher in the levels of education into, in the American middle or high school or even into university, you have many more male teachers and male role models. One of the things that we've, we, she and I have talked about over the years is really the, the lack of male teachers. Like right now she's at elementary school, sort of relatively small, but there's only one, one male teacher from grades, you know, like kindergarten through grade 5. And so I think in a parallel world or universe, I may not have gotten there out of the gate, but I think as I look at where even next, as a career choice. 
 
Mark 
It's something out there that I think about of, again, how to give back, how to influence young, young people. And there's just such a lack of investment in education and there just, there just aren't a lot of, a lot of male teachers in elementary schools. 
 
Ali 
Yeah, I certainly see the same pattern in, in the schools that my children have been to. I think there's something potentially interesting there as well around current perceptions and challenges around how masculinity shows up in society in all its various interesting forms. And also that nature of being able to teach as well. There was a really lovely quotation that a friend of mine said a few years ago when they first started working with ChatGPT for the startup they were at at the time. They said, "Actually, this isn't like programming anymore. This is actually like teaching." And if you think about it as teaching, then you will get to a very different result and you get to much better results. And I know I'm loath to bring AI into this first part of the conversation, 'cause I'm sure we'll cover it in the next as well. But I think that actually the ability to teach right now is so massively important, um, not just to the role of teachers but also to anybody else who's now working with this new generation of technology as well. 
 
Mark 
And I think I, I would add on to that, with where tech is today and how fast it is changing, having folks in, uh, being able to influence young lives, um, who have some perspective on, um, the power and the importance and how that could shape what they need to learn or how they learn feels more relevant than ever. But that also could be said in every generation as technology has evolved. But right now, just like, where does that fit? Where does generative AI fit in, in education in general, I think is a really interesting topic. As you know, my kids are— one is a freshman in college and the other is a sophomore in high school, and their perception or their uses just different. I actually wish they would embrace it more. They're a little standoffish of it. I don't know if that's because my wife and I say, well, did you ask Claude or did you talk to ChatGPT about that a little, little too much around them? But, but it's just interesting, like their professional lives are going to be so different to mine or my wife's regardless of profession that they choose. 
 
Mark 
And I worry the impact on early in career folks and this cohort that are emerging now who have these skills and also just the nature of work, I think, is changing dramatically earlier in career than later in career. 
 
Ali 
Yeah. I mean, they've got a kind of a triple whammy, haven't they, of having to go through education during the pandemic, then all the rocky economic uncertainty we're currently experiencing, and then at the same time, a complete technological upheaval of how people are going to work. So there is a huge number of quite big questions there. Do you have any sense of the kind of skills that you would love them to learn? That may have been slightly different from the ones that you learned growing up, or perhaps actually they're all the same and perhaps there's a level at which we can overestimate the amount of change. 
 
Mark 
So that is a good question that I've thought about quite a bit. And we try not to bring this into the work, into the work context, but I think it's a similar idea is that yes, the technology is drastically changing and dramatically changing, and yes, it's very powerful and But let's not forget that these are tools for people to use. And so I think back to people, eat strategy, I think an interest in learning, a curious mindset, how do you use these tools, but the things you want to do with them, whether it is make the world a better place, whether it is build something physical in the, in the real world, like I think the things that people and kids or who are going to enter the workforce at some point, like the, the outcomes are still, I think, very similar and it's the means that are changing. And so I want my kids to know how these tools all work and be very clear on how they could help them, but you have to understand them and even have a little bit of scepticism, I believe, in, in what's the promise of changing the world with a large language model. 
 
Mark 
I mean, yes, but I still think it's the people. I really hope it's still the people that are the ones that are changing the world rather than the technology and the tools. 
 
Ali 
Yeah, the separation of all of them is always one of the tells of maybe an incomplete or incoherent argument if somebody focuses only ever on one of those things. So what about if, you know, this is kind of how you talk about how you'd like your children to prepare themselves to deal with the world today. If you had a year to master any skill, any skill at all, what would it be? What would you love to learn? 
 
Mark 
What I would love to do, and it has really nothing to do with technology. So we talked a little bit about exercise and the power on the mind around exercise. I've also spent a little bit of time in the last couple years sort of trying to figure out like what meditation is all about and does it work for me? I dabbled in it a little bit. I learned a little bit about it, but I actually find exercise to be more, more of a powerful mindset or reset of mind. And so I look at martial arts actually as a place where like those, those two things come together. And so I haven't quite gotten there yet, but if I did have a year, I think I would dive into bringing, you know, the physical aspects of a martial art, whether it's karate or something else, but do it with an intent to also be part of the mindfulness that goes along with those practises and those, those approaches to whether it's self-defense or martial arts, or depending how you look at it. And so I would love to just immerse myself in that and kind of solve. 
 
Mark 
And I've, I've tried it a few times. I will say in my, where I live, if you go to a karate class, it's mostly 12-year-olds, right? And so it didn't quite have the spiritual or the experience that I was looking for. But about a year, I'd love to go, go to Asia, go find somewhere, go, or somewhere else in the U.S., and like truly immerse myself where you're not necessarily sparring with, with 12-year-olds and learning as much about the, the mindset as it is about the, the physical and the, the capability of being sort of a martial arts expert. 
 
Ali 
That's very cool. It makes me think of two things actually. One is quite trivial and personal, the other's probably broader and more significant. So the trivial and personal thing, which I'll go with first, is actually I wanted to learn martial arts when I was a kid. I remember walking down the corridor and on the right-hand side was the room to do, to learn kung fu. And that's where I wanted to go. And I was really excited. And I remember walking down there with my mum, she was like, oh great, here we go. And we ran into the room and it was very, very busy. And so I guess it's gonna be so much fun, you know, loads of people my age, everyone, you know, just a lot of them dressed in the uniform and all this kind of stuff. And it turned out that sadly that class was oversubscribed and there was no more room in the class, but my mum still needed childcare for the next hour or so. So we went to the room opposite and knocked on that door, which turned out to be ballet, which I have an enormous respect for ballet and it is a wonderful thing. 
 
Ali 
But for 7-year-old me or 6-year-old me, whatever it was, that was a left turn in life I really, I don't think I was particularly joyed about. So that was, there's 2 weeks of that before we could find something else to keep me occupied for that hour. So that was a trivial and personal thing. The slightly broader and more significant thing which I think is wildly underrated in terms of its importance in the modern world and where technology's going, is how our minds work. So I studied experimental psychology a long, long time ago, 25 years ago or so. But what really struck me as the most cogent, most coherent theory of how our minds work is actually this idea of the extended mind. So, you know, it's actually, you kind of break it down actually a bit further into kind of the idea of 4E cognition. So that the way we think is extended into the environment, it is embodied You know, we think a lot with our bodies, and there is very much a two-way communication stream. So cognition is something that has to be embodied as well. There's also this idea of inactive, so enacted. 
 
Ali 
So cognition has to be something that takes place and has actions and feedback loops. And then the idea of embedded as well, it's embedded into particular contexts and situations. But yeah, I mean, just to really support your point there, I think, and it's interesting how we see this play out with our understanding of LLMs and the extent to which they might have a ceiling, that appreciation of the unity of body and brain and cognition is incredibly important. And it's quite a strange dualism that seems to have grown up in a largely Western tradition over the past 500, 600 years. But absolutely, that more holistic view is absolutely critical to people in understanding why they feel the way they do today and how they operate. But also then, like I said, to understanding how we might replicate cognition and technology as well. So yeah, so that was an interesting leap between something very small for my childhood. Yeah. 
 
Mark 
firm believer in like it's all connected, right? Whether it's physical or mental. And particularly, again, I experience that pretty regularly coming out of some kind of exercise of how much clarity I have in my, in my head. And there's obviously the chemical reactions that go on in our bodies while you're exercising. And just like, it's really fascinating of like how all that fits together and how it works as a, as a holistic system. It's not, not one or the other. You do have to kind of work on both. 
 
Ali 
Absolutely. Yeah. Final word on that. There are two brilliant books I'd recommend to anyone listening on this topic. One is The Experience Machine by Andy Clark, who was the first person to develop this idea of, well, modern times to develop this idea of the extended mind. And secondly would be How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. So obviously marketers love to talk about the word emotion a lot. Very few of them are ever capable of actually defining it. So if you want to dig deeper into that, I would highly recommend anyone listening to read those two books. Now I'd love to focus on your career and, and who you are as a professional, who you are as a marketer. So the thing I always start with here is, is understanding your journey into marketing. So how did you first get into marketing? 
 
Mark 
So when I go in the Wayback, the Wayback Machine and look at where, how I got into tech, it was here in the Bay Area back in the you know, dating myself a little bit, but with the dot-com boom. And the way I entered that was, was not from a marketing perspective, uh, it was more from a technical perspective as a product manager. And so I've been working a little bit as a product manager, and then I had this opportunity to work at this company that I had barely really knew a whole lot about called Salesforce, um, back in 2005, uh, when the company was all about, you know, no software, the end of software, and the SaaS was SaaS, and even platform as a service cloud was new. 
 
Ali 
Were you out there holding a placard? 
 
Mark 
I have, I have not. I have certainly done my no software sign duty over in the bug, as we called it. I've done my duty there. Yes, early on. And it was just, it was an amazing company. Still is an amazing company growing at such a pace. And so I started there in product management and I did that for probably, I don't know, there 5 years, 6 years. And I always would ask myself, is Salesforce, is it the best sales company, the best marketing company, or the best product company? And ultimately the answer was yes to all of those, certainly back then. And so you had a real opportunity to like change roles. And so I was ready for a change and I made a lateral move out of product management into a group that was starting to engage with CIOs. And so that was sort of my first entry into marketing and product marketing where my role on this team that we're doing like small private roundtables and councils are bringing customers and prospects together to talk about not just the technology, but also the people and process changes that moving to the cloud would have, does have, do have. 
 
Mark 
And so I sort of became a product marketer for CIOs. I didn't really know or describe myself that way at the time, but I brought some of that product expertise to this group of facilitators and people who are just driving great dialogue and experiences for CIOs. And with that, I had the opportunity— opportunity came up to move to Australia and join the Asia Pacific marketing team in Australia. And my wife had never been. I'd been on a few trips for Salesforce there. We're like, let's go. Who doesn't love Australians? My kids were 4 and 2, and we went. And so there is when I really got immersed in marketing. This is at a time when, if you remember, content marketing was new, even sort of a much more broader online marketing experience. And so I did a number of different roles in APAC with that great opportunity to travel Singapore, Tokyo, let alone in Australia for me for work. And then I was like, I know marketing. And so actually left Salesforce while we were in Australia and joined an Australian-based tier 1 VC invested company. To run marketing, to be the VP of marketing, which I did for a couple of years. 
 
Mark 
I learned a tonne. In hindsight, it was probably a little early, more than a little early for me to take on the reins of what was really like a volume business, small business, small hotels that we were selling software to. But it got me into marketing. And then from there, I actually moved back to the US and was not my intention to rejoin Salesforce. But when I got back to the US, That's where my network was strongest and I'd left on great terms. And so that is when I really got into product marketing, joining the Service Cloud team, which is now the largest revenue product at Salesforce. I had an amazing run with an amazing team on the Service Cloud product marketing team. 
 
Ali 
That's very cool. I mean, one of the things I really enjoy hearing about is the diversity of routes that people take to get into marketing and then end up as CMOs. But actually there is a significant variable that almost become a constant in most of these conversations. Nearly a very high proportion of CMOs have at some point worked at Salesforce. It just seems like there is something in that being in that place at that time. And, you know, thinking about it, actually, you know, you, you happen to be in San Francisco when tech once again got incredibly exciting very, very quickly. You obviously being able to travel around APAC as well as that region was, had its own storey to tell. It feels a little bit like you've been quite fortunate in some ways to to be in those exciting places at those exciting times? And I appreciate, you know, you've done a lot of work since then to make the most of those opportunities, but did it feel like that at the time? Like, I'm in the middle of something really fun here. 
 
Mark 
So like when I joined Salesforce, I had come from some startups and some small, very small consulting companies doing CRM consulting at the time. And like when I got to Salesforce, like this is a different company. I mean, it was still a time where, you know, you walk down the halls, you see Marc Benioff, you see Parker Harris, you see the founders, you interact with them, and the energy was unbelievable. I think over time you sort of get used to that and it becomes a lot more normal. So my time when I left Salesforce while I was in Australia and then returned, for me, that was the most impactful for me from a career perspective. We were launching new products, we were growing billion-dollar business, Dreamforce had matured to where it was, and from a marketing perspective, the Astro and our, the theme had changes in the, and the national park and the Trailblazers and like that also felt really different and exciting. You can't imagine, maybe you could, the, the discussions on how to lay out slides when you have Astro or Cody or this theming when it first hit. And it was just monumental in the impact that it had on anybody at the company, I think, but particularly when you were in product marketing at Salesforce, it's a very strategic and impactful role. 
 
Mark 
And a real opportunity to sit obviously product, marketing, sales, which the company's amazing at in all three of those domains. And so there I was like, I definitely felt like something was happening. And then with the opportunity to move to ServiceNow on its run from $5 billion to $10 billion, and I think part of that is that's when ChatGPT hit in, you know, what was it, October of 2022. I was at ServiceNow and that those two things together felt like right time, right place. ServiceNow had been investing in building generative AI and AI capabilities, and I was in the right place as the leader of product marketing to see pace of innovation changed, pace of like launch changed. The race with our enterprise peers to lead was all built on the years of experience I had had coming from Salesforce to be able to really understand what needed to happen, but also be aware enough that it was different now, faster, stakes are higher, and a real opportunity to lead and help ServiceNow again, go from— you say those words, you're like 5 billion to 10 billion, 4 years. Like it was unbelievable to be there at that time. 
 
Ali 
I can imagine I've had the fortune to work with both of those businesses quite a bit, Salesforce and ServiceNow, and they are, you know, incredible, incredible storeys really of growth. And then obviously last June, you took the next step in your career, which is very exciting, to become CMO at DataIQ. So can you tell me a little bit about your new business and your new role? 
 
Mark 
Yeah. And in this sort of theme of building on where you've been, this role and this opportunity is absolutely built on my experiences at both Salesforce and ServiceNow about the importance of the platform and the difference between our— of being an application provider versus a platform company. And so Salesforce platform, a lot of acquisitions connecting different applications together, ended up with a platform. ServiceNow started with the platform and built applications on top of the platform for the different buying groups that they went after. Dataiku for me was more pure platform. I saw something really different of not stitching products together, that Dataiku had built a system. And so for me, the opportunity to come in and accelerate the transformation for Dataiku to being known as an AI platform company was really what got me excited. And so today Dataiku is the platform for AI success. What that means is we bring people, technology, and governance into one platform. And so there are all these tools, whether it's enterprise apps or data platforms or AI services, like every company basically has the same tools or access to the same tools. And so what's gonna differentiate or drive competitive advantage is not necessarily better tools, although each one obviously has their, their capabilities, but it's how do you bring your people into the equation and leverage their expertise to differentiate. 
 
Mark 
And you have to have people that understand the tools, but it's about the people coming together. It's about being able to orchestrate all of those tools together. So whether you are, because we sell primarily to large enterprises in regulated industries, and so they have multiple data platforms, they have multiple SaaS apps, they have multiple tools. But you gotta be able to bring your people and then orchestrate the business process or the outcome that you're trying to achieve across those tools. But you have to also be able to do it today more than ever with a view on governance and how explainability and lineage and how do you actually know a decision being made by an agent or a machine learning model or a predictive model is not only right, but you can track all the way back to where that decision was made. And so for us, we, we look at it as really this formula for AI success. It's about your people, it's about your orchestration, and it's about your governance. And fundamentally, we have delivered this in places like Johnson Johnson or Roche or LVMH, which is one of our most exciting customers, and doing it at scale. 
 
Mark 
And so when you look at the platform, the customer success, and the opportunity to bring my experience, that was my formula for joining Dataiku. 
 
Ali 
I love that for two reasons. First of all, as you pointed out, the word platform can have many different meanings, and we throw it around very quickly. And it is a word that most tech companies, certainly at some point in their lives, want to be seen as, you know, the platformization of whether it's cybersecurity or other spaces. Platform is always going to be one of those words that feels incredibly important and valuable if you can own it. But actually, it can mean very, very different things. Like you said, there are different interpretations of what a platform can be. Whether it is a kind of MuleSoft plus acquisition strategy of Salesforce, or like you said, ServiceNow or Dataiku, as you talked about, all slightly different inflexions of the word platform. The other thing is your point around AI and the value that can be generated from it and how it will generate that value. There's a lovely book called Reshuffle by a guy called Sankalp Chaudhary. He talks a lot about the value of AI really being around coordination and obviously orchestration, as you termed it. And that I think is a far more interesting take than a lot of the kind of quick hacks to do this one thing you wanted to do, sort of approach that you get a lot of the noise around, particularly on social media. 
 
Ali 
So I think that's a really, really interesting space. And it's lovely to see how your storey has crossed two of these mega trends in tech. One of them platformization, obviously now landing where you are around the time that GenAI is really, really blooming. What does that mean for marketing then at DataIQ? What is the role of marketing there? And how might it be different to previous places you've worked? 
 
Mark 
I think the race to own enterprise AI is happening now. It's what is exciting and it's really the opportunity for marketing at Dataiku. And really there are this, I don't, I describe this often this way is like the things that I'm focused on for marketing are not complicated. They're not necessarily easy to go and do, but they're not complicated. I want every CIO, call it the Global 2000 companies in the world, to know who Dataiku is and what we stand for, that we are a trusted partner for their business transformation, which today is being fueled by AI. That is like how I think about what we're trying to build with the brand and the positioning that we have developed. And it's ultimately all about what our customers are doing to build that brand. I want to be a customer-led marketing organisation where It's what LVMH is doing. It's what SoftBank is doing. It's what J&J are doing really are the definition or become the definition of AI success, but it can't only be about brand. And so at the same time, I am like deep in how do I have marketing be a significant and accountable contributor to growth that I want marketing to be right in the front seat of the car, the bus, whatever the, the journey metaphor is. 
 
Mark 
With sales on how we're driving growth at the company. And so again, not rocket science. I want everybody to know who we are and I want marketing to be seen as an equal contributor to the growth. And I know I'm not going to do that by telling people that's what I want. One of the things I brought into Dataiku, which I feel is the way to operate here, is to go and do that. And so It's been 6 months and we have shifted the company storey and the narrative to the platform for AI success. We have refreshed our brand to be more tech and maybe a little bit more grown up than where we were previously. We've launched a new website. I've worked really hard and with our product teams to launch 3 new product offerings. And so to me, those are the things that demonstrate how the change and What, what marketing's role can be at Dataiku. And the next sort of, it's not quite chapter because chapter 1 is still being written as we evolve those things we've just done. But the next step is again, this, this pipeline transformation on being digital first, AI oriented in the way that we operate to grow marketing's reputation at the company and for Dataiku across the globe. 
 
Ali 
I love the simplicity of those two 2 streams of ambition for marketing in the business. Is there a particular way that you've organised your team to help you realise that? Because, you know, I think a lot of CMOs or a lot of marketing leaders out there would go, yeah, I mean, those are 2 things that echo a lot what I would be interested in creating in my business. How do you go about achieving it? 
 
Mark 
There's multiple answers to that. Maybe there's a today and a very fast follow tomorrow. Coming in, I needed to bring some core structure. And really, I guess, looking at where I've been and what I've launched at Salesforce, what I launched at ServiceNow, what I've seen out there is similar to the not sophisticated problems. Like today we're fairly straightforward in like, I have a product marketing organisation, I have a field marketing organisation, marketing operations, and corporate marketing. And I've got silos of digital happening. So the initial transformation or change for the marketing organisation was to break down some of these silos and invest in places like product marketing and digital marketing in particular, and marketing operations with an eye towards this shift to being much more digitally oriented. Joining, like other enterprise B2B companies, we do a lot of events and they're very successful and we drive significant amount of our pipeline come from events. The shift of where we're going to get to is I need another significant source that's predictable, that's efficient, that is accurate, and that's going to come from digital. So over the next few months, we're going to be making, like building a true digital team of bringing content and the website and our digital marketing together and thinking about how we would build a real, not efficient, say real, a new campaign operating model that is aligned to our go-to-market and our ideal customer profile. 
 
Mark 
Which is large enterprises, $10 billion of revenue or more in regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and really shifting from a lead orientation to an account orientation, which not news, not a newsflash, but that is, that is new for Dataiku that we have marketing and sales aligned on the account engagement, the buying groups, and that is how I have signed up to be measured is how are we driving engagement with the buying groups of the accounts we care about to drive pipeline. And that is going to require some additional changes in how we're structured, particularly where I want us to bring a, like a beginner's mind on how we think about creating a campaign operating model because the tools similar to how we talk to our customers, like We have all the tools we need. What we need is a mindset and an approach that gets us there as quickly as possible. 
 
Ali 
And that's interesting, that shift towards, you know, maybe from QLs to MQAs or QBGs, qualified buying groups. That's something obviously we've helped a lot of clients with over the past few years. There was something else that you touched upon because one of the other things we talk about a lot is the really big challenge I think for most CMOs today and most marketing functions is just the sheer level of chaos. That is partly caused by external and very kind of macro factors. And the solve for that really is coherence. So you tell me a little bit about like, what have you seen in your career that is causing chaos in marketing teams? And then on the flip side, what are the things that you've done to help create a more coherent marketing or revenue function? 
 
Mark 
I believe that if you don't know where you're going, no amount of budget or headcount or technology is going to save you. So what causes the chaos is a lack of clarity around those things. And so the companies that you look, you look around the ones that are winning now, back to this tools thing, like aren't winning because they have better tools. They're winning because sales and marketing and product are all pointed in the same direction. Even at a, at a company, whether it's larger, I think smaller as I've talked to, as I've gotten into this role, I've done quite a bit of networking with, within the CMO community, talking to, you know, former colleagues that are at larger companies or similar size companies. And if you don't have a strategy and you don't have alignment on where, not only where marketing is going, but where the company is going, you're gonna have chaos. That's when the silos start to pop up and people operate really independently. And so I think alignment isn't just an idea or like a soft concept. It's really a competitive advantage where if you can get senior leadership who can then be on the same page and then align and communicate that to their organisations. 
 
Mark 
And so people at all levels have an idea, the same idea, not just an idea, but actually the same idea as to where the company is going. You're gonna, I think, diminish the chaos because you're all sort of heading in the same direction. No tool can solve that. It's philosophical, it's mindset, and it's really a lot of communication. 
 
Ali 
I 100% agree with all of that. Yeah, absolutely. I realise we're running close to time now. So if it's okay, I'm going to ask you a few quickfire questions. First of all, name a marketing hero of yours. 
 
Mark 
So the first one is what I consider the best CMO I ever worked for, which was Stephanie Beshemi at Salesforce. Every single conversation I had with her, I walked away having learned something. I think that was felt by all of us. Then it didn't matter if you were in brand or demand or in product marketing, she showed up as the expert every time. But what was also really powerful was her empathy. Like I generally felt she cared about me as a person and not just as a part of her team. And then she had this saying that stayed with me ever since. And it, it, it connects to some of the questions or things we've already talked about, about pipeline cures all ills for marketing. So if you were delivering pipeline, everything else, you get some breathing room and you've earned, you earned the right to go and operate and be creative and try new things. but you got to deliver the pipeline. And then one I've sort of been watching more closely the last couple of years is Latane Conant, who was the CMO at Sixth Sense and has moved now at Parloa. And what I've seen from a distance on how Sixth Sense evolved their, their position and their, their marketing and like punched well above her weight and took a company that was people I never really heard of and turned it into this like defining voice around account-based marketing and AI-powered pipeline. 
 
Mark 
And so I've never met her, but I would just look at how that company has evolved. They have a huge presence in this shift. And as I look at like what I'm doing at Dataiku to become more account-oriented, I've been going through a lot of their content, a lot of their playbooks, and just very impressed with how they've operated. Very good. 
 
Ali 
Thank you. Next quickfire question then will be complete this sentence. 
 
Mark 
The qualities I look for in my next exceptional hire are learning and the learning mindset. And I would add to that systems thinking. So tools are changing so fast, but it's the mindset of learning, evolving, and how do you connect all these things together is what I'm looking for in my next, next leaders and anybody I bring to my team. Okay. 
 
Ali 
So in the spirit of psychological safety, creating a space where people are comfortable sharing their own mistakes, what was a mistake that you've made in the past couple of weeks? 
 
Mark 
So, uh, very recently we have sort of kicked off a new executive engagement programme and bringing senior leaders, chief data officers, CIOs together with, with our CEO for dinner. And we did one of these last week in San Francisco around HumanX, and I hadn't led one in a while. It was an amazing location. The, you know, guests arrived and two of our customers basically took over the conversation as they walked in the door. And so we skipped some of the basics. We skipped like name cards or place cards for where people should sit so we can orchestrate who they talk to. We skipped introductions so we could identify, like we did informal, but like, uh, I wanted, in hindsight, I, I need to facilitate that of like, why are you here? What are you looking to do? What's on your mind? And then it was just too free-forming, free-form of a, of an experience. I think we got through everybody's opportunity to talk to the CEO and talk strategy and roadmap, but it just felt like right from the beginning of that event, I lost control. I don't love that. 
 
Ali 
Thank you for sharing. What's something that most people get wrong about you? 
 
Mark 
Contrary— and I actually say this even in my family sometimes— contrary to common belief, I, I'm actually fun and funny. I think at work I show up very, very as a very serious, like, I, we have things to do, we have change to make, and I can often get focused too much on the work. But I, I went to a, an event a few months ago where, um, the topic was like bringing levity into the workplace and bringing humour. And it, it really, really spoke to me as a way to help me bring more of my authentic self to work. Joke that I'm actually working on every day now of like, obviously you wanna be positive. You don't wanna take swipes at people from a humour perspective cuz we're also serious, but we're not saving lives as we bring Dataiku to market. So let's have a little bit more perspective. And I think humour can be a way to break through, but I don't know that my colleagues would think of me as the like fun guy, but, um, I'm working on it. 
 
Ali 
We should ask them. Okay. Finally, what's one piece of advice or one idea either about marketing or about life in general that you keep coming back to? 
 
Mark 
It's the people. And we talked about this just a little bit, but technology, well, maybe AI won't go, but technology comes and goes. And there's always, and I've seen in my career, whether it was cloud or mobile or social, there's always something that's going to come. And I do love being in the middle of all of that, but through it all, it is the connexions you make and the relationship that you build with people that are gonna last longer, I think, than most of the technology trends. And so when I look back at people I'm still in touch with from the early days of Salesforce, like if you work together, you go through things together and it creates real bonds. Same thing with ServiceNow. I still, um, have dinner regularly with people and around where I live that I worked with there. And I expect the same thing to happen at Dataiku. And so, It really is about empowering people, creating an opportunity for them to be successful and not getting too hung up in the seriousness of the work that we do and trying to bring real authenticity to the interactions I have with the people around me. 
 
Ali 
Brilliant. What a lovely note to end on. So Mark, thank you so much for joining us today. 
 
Mark 
Yeah, thank you very much. This has been terrific.