Adventurous CMO
Adventurous CMO, presented by Grizzly, is a show about the leaders behind the world’s most Adventurous Brands. Each week, hosts Greg Gibson and Nate Spees explore and make sense of the changing world of marketing, and hold brave conversations with today’s brand leaders.
From rebrands to campaigns and creativity to culture, get a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to be different, demand attention, and drive growth.
Alongside the world’s most innovative CMOs and creative leaders, we cut through the noise, break down the work behind the work, and help people navigate the best way to build brands that breakthrough in culture.
Join us on Adventurous CMO as we explore the insights, ideas, and innovation at the heart of the brands and the work you love.
30 minutes. Every week. Live on LinkedIn. Available everywhere you listen.
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Adventurous CMO
E07 - The Growth-Focused Operator with Gleb Brichko
In this episode, Greg Gibson and Nate Spees sit down with longtime collaborator and marketing leader Gleb Brichko, CMO of Harness, who shares his journey from a teenage HTML tinkerer to a demand-driven CMO at some of the fastest-growing tech companies.
Gleb’s path has been shaped by a bias toward action, deep collaboration, and an unwavering belief that creativity should always be accountable to performance.
You’ll hear what it’s really like to build brands inside high-growth startups, how to align with sales and engineering, and why internal consensus (not just clever creative) is the key to lasting impact.
He unpacks what he’s building at Harness, the cultural principles he’s instilling, and how prioritizing team trust and clarity fuels both growth and morale.
If you're a modern marketing leader balancing vision with velocity, this conversation is a candid, energizing look at scaling without losing your soul.
Sponsored by Grizzly, Adventurous CMO is hosted by Nate Spees and Greg Gibson.
Grizzly is an independent creative agency. We guide brands onward™ to challenge convention and impact culture.
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(Speaker 2) Hey everybody, welcome to episode 7 of Adventurous CMO. We're really excited to have on the show this week, Gleb Richko, CMO at Harness and longtime collaborator. We're really excited to get into his mindset as a CMO and his point of view on brands, being focused on operating at scale and really growing alongside the brands that he's leading.(Speaker 2) So, welcome, Gleb.(Speaker 1) Thanks for having me, guys. Good to see you.(Speaker 8) Yeah, how are you? Where are you calling in from today? He's leading. So, uh, welcome, Gleb. Yeah. Thanks for having me guys. Good to see you.(Speaker 7) Yeah. How are you?(Speaker 3) Where are you?(Speaker 1) Where are you calling in from today? Uh, calling in from my home, uh, fresh off, uh, a week on the road, uh, in my home office today, but heading into our, uh, HQ once we were up, up here. Nice. I feel like when we talked last week, you were in Jersey. Yeah, last week was Jersey, but this week back in a beautiful sunny day area.(Speaker 2) Awesome.(Speaker 1) I'd love to maybe start, you could give the people listening a little bit of your background, maybe start with some of your origin story, which I think is super inspiring and really(Speaker 3) interesting.(Speaker 1) Yeah, absolutely. So, going back many years to the last century, born and raised in Ukraine, moved here with my folks to the Bay Area, very fortunate to have ended up here sort of like at the rise of the Silicon Valley wave.(Speaker 1) So I grew up around here. I went to school around here, actually, uh, landed in, uh, marketing by complete accident in high school. I thought I'm going to be a video game designer. I got a summer internship working at a company that, uh, 3d model prototyping, which I thought was like close enough to gaming.(Speaker 1) Um, spend the summer, you the summer installing Windows NT on people's machines and watching the bar grow. And then they were rebranding the company and they threw a project my way and they were like, hey, why don't you build us a website? And so I picked up an HTML book and went at it. Since then, I've held a variety of demand jobs, creative jobs, brand jobs. But then really owned in on the demand side of the house probably five five, six years into my career and haven't left it since. Over the years, I've been very fortunate to experience(Speaker 1) some earlier stage, high growth startups, and then was very fortunate to work for some brands like Fortinet, like Nutanix, like Rubrik, and now at another rocket ship called Hunus.(Speaker 2) Love it. Awesome. Yeah, I know when we first started collaborating, you were at Nutanix and demand role, but certainly doing a lot more than that. Talk a little bit about the journey as a brand and marketing leader in those high growth startups like what was that feel like? I know a lot of our listeners might be at a public company or might be agency side. What's the high growth startup vibe? What does that feel like as a as a marketing leader?(Speaker 1) Yeah, I mean, I want to tell everyone about like our journey Other I don't even know how many what like 10 11 years now. We've been working together. Yeah for sure You know, I always uh, you know when folks ask me for referrals for a great agency You know, I always obviously hold you guys in higher guard I still remember the days when you guys were like a three or four person shop and We had this it was the website project, right?(Speaker 1) Like the website overhaul for Nutanix. And I just remember like the all hands on deck, uh, vibe that we had, um, inside the company and you guys like absolutely matched that vibe that we needed at the time. And it was just kind of like, no holds barred has to get done. Um, and we got it done and we've done all kinds of crazy projects for you guys,(Speaker 1) both on the website and all that, but I'll never forget it, you know, I'll never forget how, um, closely we partnered with you all and like, you know, it was, it was, uh, it, it almost felt not even almost, it felt like you guys were like in house with us and Bill Miller and a couple of other folks who were just like killing ourselves at the time. Uh, and I get all this stuff stood up and you guys were totally in the boat with us.(Speaker 1) And I always, uh, look back at those times fondly. But as far as, you you know early startup vibe it's like you know the way to describe it is there's you're surrounded by vacuum right you're always trying to punch above your weight there's vacuum everywhere you know there's never enough people there's never enough dollars and it's all about you know being strategic but at the same time you know, a quote that I use from a colleague of mine(Speaker 1) is like, you have to get dirt under your fingernails, right? Like you can't be a top, you have to be in the business. And so when I look back at some of those journeys, it's like, there's no, there's no job that's beneath you. You know, everyone's an ICE regardless of what title you hold. And for me personally, that's probably the most rewarding and the most exciting part of the journey.(Speaker 1) I'd say the difference is, some companies you're kind of just like building absolutely from the ground up. And that's interesting and exciting, and you can really sort of leave your mark on things. But once you start getting into companies that are a little bit further along the journey,(Speaker 1) you really have to start thinking about not just how you build, but how you build for scale. And if push comes to shove, next year, if you did everything right this year, next year, you have to 10x the way you did this. And so building that foundation is just critical.(Speaker 1) Even when you're early along the journey. For sure. I love that you said that. It's been fun being able to be on that journey with you and having experienced some of those moments in multiple different instances over the years.(Speaker 1) But one of the things that I've always found, there's two Glebisms that I have to share because there are a few things that like have lived with our team far beyond like, you know, collaborating and all that. One is, I remember for any account managers(Speaker 1) listening out there, there's something that Gleb said once that literally changed how we think about client services, which was, and you'll probably not remember it, Gleb, but one time back in the day, I remember I was trying to get ahold of you(Speaker 1) and I couldn't get ahold of you, and I was like, what? I emailed you and I texted you once, and you were like, if you haven't emailed me or texted me 20 times and I haven't said, Nate, stop trying to get ahold of me. You have not tried hard enough to get ahold of me.(Speaker 1) Really, it was really funny, because it wasn't said in anything but intentionality. And I loved it because it was a great reminder that sometimes when you're on the agency side of things, with the best of intentions, you can be a little bit passive. And it's(Speaker 1) actually because you're not wanting to annoy someone. But what I loved about that is you gave us permission to be all in with you and to do what is necessary to keep things moving. And we always took that like we took that to heart. And I literally still tell account folks on our team that on like a regular basis when they're like, Hey, I emailed him once and I'm like, Nope, not enough. Like, tell me when you call them. You know, people are always afraid to, you know, I noticed that people are like afraid to like cross the line. But I've actually, you know, gotten a lot better on that over the years and(Speaker 1) actually hold my team to like a higher standard on that, that when somebody is trying to get a hold of you, even if you don't have an answer at the moment, tell them that you acknowledge it and tell them that you'll come back with an answer. So I've gotten better at that need. Sorry. No, but no, I really like it was truly a positive.(Speaker 1) But the other one that I love, I always will take with us is that you mentioned in the startup environment, it being a place where you're having to leverage every dollar and make decisions really intentionally. But I've always been inspired by your deliberate. You will get clarity of what your vision is for a specific need or how you plan to solve it from a marketing standpoint, whether that's a campaign, a site, some sort of demand gen experience, etc. But then what I've always respected about how you make decisions is that once you've made a decision, you're deliberate about like execution and following through on that and then getting as much learning as possible,(Speaker 1) which it probably comes from your demand roots. But I'd love to like that's something I've always been inspired by is your like your capacity to go, we're going to do this. And then let's let's follow it through and see what happens on the other side, which I do think oftentimes in marketing, especially now with how much data and information we have access to, it can almost create some analysis paralysis. How do you stay locked in on being deliberate and decisive with your decision making? Yeah, I mean, analysis paralysis is a good way to describe, like I've hit that. My teams have hit that a few times, but at some point, you know, you have some deadlines, unmovable deadlines, and you just can't afford to like sit and then(Speaker 1) argue anymore. And you just have to go to like sit and argue anymore and you just have to go and get it done and sort of like see what happens. So there's always an element of risk. I'll add one more thing to your, working with agencies.(Speaker 1) Obviously agencies and agency partners have a lot of responsibility, right? Like just being professional partners(Speaker 6) and being an integral part of things have a lot of responsibility, right? Like just being professional partners and,(Speaker 5) being an integral part of things that you get engaged on.(Speaker 1) I think responsibility also sits squarely on the client to give enough guidance and not kind of like send the agency partners on the wild goose chase. Cause you know, time is money and effort. And at some point you end up sort of burning out and so you kind of have to drive yourself to an internal deadline by when you have to make that call and if you see the deadline slipping it just means you have to invest more time and effort to get to the right decision or what you think at the time is the right decision. So but in terms of, you know, prioritization and(Speaker 1) in terms of prioritization and driving to an outcome like. I'm talking to Greg about this, I've talked to Greg about this a bunch of times, like I spent I feel like I spent the first half of my career doing like doing and learning arts and crafts marketing, you know, the kind of marketing where like marketing leaders first half of my career doing like doing and learning arts and crafts marketing. You know, the kind of marketing where like marketing leaders just get replaced(Speaker 1) and you're just out there doing like this ephemeral stuff that ultimately like. It's very hard to quantify, very hard to tie to company success. You're going to market steam success. And I had an experience at another company where, you know, marketing was not sort of held in high regard. And part of the reason for that is because it couldn't be quantified. It's like, hey, you could spend this much money or this much money.(Speaker 1) It's hard to like quantify the outcome on the business. And it really forced me to go and figure out like this is like before or in the early stages of like marketing automation. It was very, very long before like there were like attribution models and first I all of this stuff was like in its infancy, but it kind of forced my hand to go and tie, you know, and at the time it was very painful, very manually. I got two interns to just like sit there and like crush Excel, two analysts, interns, finance interns to crush, crush Excel like the entire summer.(Speaker 1) That's all that they did for like two and a half months. But on the other end of that, it was like, Hey, here's the dollars that we invested. Here's the campaigns that we drove. Here's the activities that we executed. And we're actually able to like, you know, back then manually link them to, uh, meetings and opportunities and(Speaker 1) ultimately closed one business. And it was hard and it was ambiguous, but at the end of the day it was very rewarding. And so, you know, being able to quantify the inputs and outputs became very clear to me. And then secondly, you know, none of this stuff works if sales and marketing are not in lockstep.(Speaker 5) Right?(Speaker 1) If marketing's out there doing, you know, God knows what and salespeople are not really like benefiting from that. And, you know, I've seen times and times again, marketing leaders going in and trying to represent their team's impact on like website sessions and social impressions and you know those kinds of things that like don't ultimately like help your sales organization. Yeah and you know innately as marketers we know that there's an impact and there's somewhere(Speaker 1) but it's very hard to tie it to the company targets and so over the years you know myself and folks of my team and a lot of peers, like I think there was a major shift in the last like 15 years or so that, um, you know, marketing is like a responsible gutter marketing function, uh, and should be driven by performance metrics. And, you know, as a marketing leader, your responsibility is to, you know,(Speaker 1) align with sales and what those metrics are, align with the rest of the company on what those metrics are, and then, you know, kind of like build your activity mix and your execution around that. And that just makes the decision process a lot easier. Because then you know, like, what are the vitamins, you know, and what are the painkillers of what your team has to go do?(Speaker 1) And I feel like there's still a huge window and an opportunity for creativity and finding, you know, really interesting solutions to problems and still coming up with like, things that look different, that inspire, that engage. But at the end of the day, like, how do you connect that to what the business needs to grow? Absolutely. Yeah, I think I mean, at the end of the day, you know, you have multiple stakeholders as a marketing leader(Speaker 1) and you have to find a way to serve them all. But the ultimate stakeholder is the business and making sure that you're driving growth. I'll share my favorite all-in moment from our collaboration. From our first memorable shoot and for one reason or another, we ended up with a kiddie pool full of Gatorade.(Speaker 1) And Gleb jumped right in, all in, holding the Gatorade, getting wet. It was amazing. And we use often the David Ogilvy quote, everybody washes windows at Grizzly. And I think it's just a mnemonic of maybe flip it around.(Speaker 1) Like as an agency, you love to see your clients just get in the weeds with you and contribute ideas. I think it's often under, it's just not talked about enough. There's this white castle mentality where I'm paying you, you're on my clock, come up with ideas.(Speaker 1) But the best clients are all in, contributing ideas, contributing strategy, and I think you're a great example of that from all of our collaboration. I think one of the things that we talked about, like just the constant churn at quick growth, high growth companies. One of the things that I noticed is you've had the opportunity to learn from some amazing leaders at each step of of the journey(Speaker 1) that at least we've had view into talk a little bit about some of the things that you've taken away from Howard, Ben, some of these other amazing leaders that you've had, had an opportunity to learn from I remember remember there's one meeting at a brew brick call we were on, where we heard from from one of your leaders, give me something that scares me. And I want I want to I want to be able to turn it down. I probably won't but I want I want you to show me something that I, you know, I have the opportunity to(Speaker 1) turn down. And so I think that kind of leadership shows up in a variety of ways. And just maybe tell, tell us a little bit about what you've learned from some of the leaders you've, you've worked(Speaker 2) with.(Speaker 1) Yeah, no, you're right. I've been like I said, I've been very fortunate to under some of the best leaders that I've had, you know, just thinking like Julie and then, you know, Dan Rogers, some of those folks like, at a great degree of autonomy, to go and figure it out. Having said that, you know, Ben had, especially when it came to brand, Ben, for example, had like very strong points of view.(Speaker 1) And so we have a lot of walks and discussions and whiteboards in terms of like what needs to happen. But I think that given your team, the ability to go and. Come up with.(Speaker 5) I know you guys probably didn't love my approach, but it's like I always wanted to the ability to go and come up with,(Speaker 1) I know you guys probably didn't love my approach, but it's like I always wanted to start with the funnel, you know, like start with like 10 ideas, and then iterate on those ideas, and sometimes 10 goes to like 15, and sometimes it goes to seven, and then goes to three,(Speaker 1) and then you iterate on the three, and you land on the one. The thing that pops in my mind is the, um, uh, the last collaboration that we did at Nutanix, uh, all together now, you know, like super proud of that. Uh, and we've done it for sure. You know, we had done a few in between, but you know, the, the leader's sort of(Speaker 1) role in the process is to like send the team off, um, on kind of a fact finding mission, you know, on a creative exploration mission, um, and then riff on it like endlessly, right. Well, not endlessly, right. There is a death line, but ultimately, ultimately, you know, I just always remember, you know, working with you guys and some other agency partners or even internal, it's like there's that riffing process and kind of like throwing(Speaker 1) spaghetti at the wall process and everybody knows what we need to say. But once you land on that one thing, like everybody, like the light goes off and everybody's eyes light up and you're like, this is it. This is the one. And then you just go and polish it and like just make it great and beautiful and so you know that was probably like the biggest takeaway for me is that I was most creative and successful and driven when I had the agency to go and do the things,(Speaker 1) to deliver the outcome at the end of the day, and obviously partner closely internally, externally, but at the end of the day, I had the autonomy to go and do the things that we all needed to do, because I understood the task. And so, that was probably one of my biggest(Speaker 1) leadership learning moments. You don't, as a leader, you shouldn't and you can't always be the person to be the one to mandate and prescribe and come up with the idea. That's why you hire great people, to let them go and do their best work. Right. And I also did durations, you know, that are not as great where, you know,(Speaker 1) leaders have been sometimes over prescriptive and kind of had their own vision. And it's like my vision or, or, or the highway. And that's like, that's not the way to lead. You know, that's not, that doesn't foster like the greatest environment(Speaker 1) and inevitably you don't end up with a great product. I really maybe once or twice remember having to prescribe and then in retrospect I was like, you know what, it was okay, but is this the best work that we could have done as a team? Probably not. And so both of those times were great learning experiences for me. Even to this day, we still get together as a team and have brainstorms and little micro-campaigns(Speaker 1) that we do around some asset launch or an analyst launch report. So it's not truly a campaign, but like spending an hour with the team, just riffing ideas and everybody's laughing. And, you know, you just like throw the wildest stuff out there and people are just cracking up. And like, those are probably like some of the like best among my most favorite,(Speaker 1) um, uh, moments in collaborating with the team, you know, cause a lot of the best and my most favorite moments in collaborating with the team. A lot of the other stuff is performance and spreadsheets.(Speaker 2) For that little bit of time, you get to be a marketer. Like from our collaboration early on, you and the people giving you that autonomy all believe that like being boring was bad for business. And that's something that's kind of been persistent for us. I think, especially in tech and enterprise B2B, like it's uncommon and the proof is in the results.(Speaker 2) I think one thing that I know from all of our collaboration is, those relationships and collaboration have really mattered over time, like the web of relationships both for you and your journey and for us in our journey. Talk about the importance of collaboration and partnership, especially internally for you as a marketing leader, like how you build that really tight collaboration(Speaker 2) with sales, with some of the other orgs inside of the company in order to win.(Speaker 1) Yeah. Look, it's something that I've, you know, that's another leadership lesson that I learned, you know, from some of the stronger leaders I've worked for. You know, like Ben was really,(Speaker 1) Ben and Julie in particular were very strong and, you know, leaning into that and teaching me to do that and prioritizing that. It's not super natural for a lot of people, you know, to invest time there. Like a lot of people kind of go into their bubble and and then struggle to like break through the bubble because like there's nothing worse that can happen than like, you know, creating something in a bubble and then trying to like sell it to other people.(Speaker 1) So you try and other people like without having consulted and were like gotten their opinion. So like one of the things, you know, I've just like learned how to do. And now it's like almost instinctual, right? Is that any big idea? A big idea that's going to like represent the company externally the company externally, whether from a brand perspective(Speaker 1) or a market perspective, you need to socialize the heck out of it. You guys remember how many times I've come to you and said, hey, I need a storyboard for this crazy idea I have so I can go and show it to every regional sales leader because what may work in North America might not, or probably will not work in Japan. Right. So it's actually really important.(Speaker 1) I go and spend time with like the Japanese marketer and the Japanese sales leader to make sure that it lands in the region. And if it doesn't, you know, do we need to go and reconfigure, like, how can we make these things work? Right. Because without getting that buy-in early on, um, you know, from a product organization, from the leadership, from the sales organization, whatever you're(Speaker 1) working on, like that thing's going to be dead on arrival. Right. Because without cross functional and like cross company support and adoption, you know, your, your campaign will end two weeks after you put it into market. Coming back to the project that we did at Nutanix all together now, that thing had a(Speaker 1) shelf life of 18 to 24 months. And usually we would go and refresh, you know, every 12 months or so, like around our, um, uh, sales kickoff timeframe. So we were kind of like on a schedule and this thing permeated, you know, field demand activities and direct mails. And like, we really got a lot of legs out of it. And all of that was due to the fact that like everybody was bought in.(Speaker 1) Yeah. If for like, before like a single asset got produced. Before we went and did everything. So yeah, that's a huge priority for me. There were a couple of other campaigns, like smaller in-house campaigns that we did that were actually great campaigns, but they were shelved because we just couldn't get the buy-in or it wasn't the round top and all that. But then like the time came and when the time came, we were like, make(Speaker 1) most, we made the most out of the opportunity because by then everybody kind of arrived that, hey, it's time for us to go and. You know, go pick a fight with a competitor or make a statement in the market that hasn't been made before. And so sometimes it's just a timing issue, but again, it's one of those things where,(Speaker 1) when you have competitor organizations talk about something that you launched that bothered them so deeply, they talk about it three years. And you have the full weight of the organizational support behind it and people who are bought in. It just, you know, it just, it adds like so much, so much more weight and so much more(Speaker 1) reach and excitement and internal support to where the thing just has legs, you know, and yeah, that's, I'm glad you hit on that because that's critical for any marketer to really embrace and believe in and operate that way. Very well said. I think that that's, if there was one learning and takeaway that we could take away from being on the agency side for well over a decade with various(Speaker 1) CMOs and a lot of different enterprise organizations and high growth organizations. It's that the more consensus that's built internally ahead of any campaign or brand transformation and the more executive buy-in that can exist before any of that stuff gets launched. It's a hundred percent of the time it will be better received in the, like across the board, internally and externally from a marketplace standpoint, from an internal culture perspective, because it just goes so far when people are bought in on a unified vision.(Speaker 1) And I think that that's something that, uh, I wish I could say happens more often, but it's crazy that that is often the biggest detractor or anchor to a successful campaign, successful brand transformations, et cetera, is that that doesn't happen.(Speaker 1) And there's like a hopeful wish that maybe it'll happen down the road. And it just generally, the snowball doesn't work that way. And it doesn't lead to the outcomes(Speaker 4) that people are looking for.(Speaker 1) Yeah, and when you lag the snowball effect after the campaign has launched, like, you know, another thing I realized, like, it's just not great for team morale. You know, because people spend all this time and effort and now they walk out and they're like, Hey, we don't have an opportunity to like be creative and do exciting things here. We're just going to keep doing the pictures of servers in the data center for the next(Speaker 1) three years. It burns a lot of people out. To your point, it's very much a leader's responsibility to make sure the consensus is there and that you've created that safe creative space for people to go and do their best work, something that they can look back on in their career and be super proud. For sure. For sure. Well, tell us about the day, where you're at today. We'd love(Speaker 1) to know a little bit more about Harness. Share a little bit about the marketing work you're building there and how you're building the culture, why it's an exciting company and product(Speaker 2) and get people hyped.(Speaker 1) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So Harness is solving, I would say, one of the most existential problems that exists out there today. There are about, give and take, 30 million software developers in the world. Believe it or not, there's a shortage of software developers out there. Because if you look at, if you think at, you know, just sort of like any kind of innovation that happens in the world today, 99% of the time it's, it's powered(Speaker 1) by software, right? And so you need more developers, like there is more code that's being pushed than ever before today or being produced an hour before today. And now, with all these AI tools and all the coding agents and all that, like there's actually even more code that's being pushed out. The challenge is, how do you deliver that code(Speaker 1) from a developer's laptop or a developer environment(Speaker 5) into actual production.(Speaker 1) And so that's kind of like why Harness exists. You know, roughly like 15 years ago, there was an introduction of this thing called DevOps, right, with the explosion of cloud and microservices. And teams were really looking to move away from that monolithic way of launching applications. Once or twice a year, the goal is you create some code, you test it, you secure it, you get it into production. And so that's why Harness exists. The company got started in 2017 by a guy named Jyoti Bansal,(Speaker 1) who was previously the founder of a company, AppDynamics, that was sold to Cisco on the eve of its IPO, which is a really interesting and legendary Silicon Valley story. And so Jyoti is an engineer at heart. Fun fact, I actually used to work with Jyoti decades ago at this little startup.(Speaker 1) He was a staff software engineer. I was a marketing specialist and followed his success over the years. When the opportunity came to join his company, I jumped on it. Great guy. Absolutely just like star and innovator and really a great name in this case. So in 2017 he started a company to do just that.(Speaker 1) There was this sprawl in this concept of DevOps, right? Like, how do you get code into production faster and better for multiple development teams working on different parts of applications? How do you streamline that process? Because the whole concept of DevOps ended up being(Speaker 1) just a total, like, scattershot, you know, yard sale collection of different tools and open source projects and all of it was like held together by scripts and duct tape and it was just messy. And the biggest challenge with that approach is that all these millions of developers out there are spending 40-50% of their time just doing grunt work.(Speaker 1) Inside Harness we call it toil. And it's all about keeping these scripts together and trying to secure things and all that. So they're not in that flow state where they're building applications, writing great code, improving on their features.(Speaker 1) It's like 50% of your time is spent washing the dishes instead of preparing a beautiful meal. And so it's a big problem. you know, the reality is that the problem has not been solved. Um, and so harness has a very different approach to it. You know, the company has, um, uh, the best in class what's called(Speaker 1) continuous delivery product, which is essentially the pipeline of getting your software from, you know, the developer's laptop into production. And over the years, the company added what inside the company we call modules, which are essentially like all the different components or the previously used to be standalone tools that are now integrated into this delivery pipeline. And so it's for everything from, you know, testing the code,(Speaker 1) QAing the code, securing the code, making sure that your application can withstand, you know, network disruptions and server downtimes, testing features before you deploy them at scale and market. You guys probably remember, you know, there was recently a security vendor who like brought half of the world's talent. With something that easily could have been avoided if you use a solution like Harness(Speaker 1) because you know, if you're able to like get through all these checks and balances, right? That make sure that your application is not going to fail and you do a measured rollout, right? You 100% can avoid these kind of incidents. Bugs are inevitable, there's always going to be bugs, but it's all about how do you deploy the code in the most secure and efficient manner. And so that's what the company is about at a(Speaker 1) high level. The pace of innovation here is second to none. Like I've never seen anything like it. Like every year we're adding products or there's been a couple of like really successful mergers and acquisitions.(Speaker 1) And so now we're kind of like filling that vacuum. Going back to our earlier conversation, we're filling the vacuum in the DevOps and engineering space to help organizations go from pushing code once every two months to multiple times a day. They're pushing out edits and changes to their code and doing it safely and securely, which(Speaker 2) in today's world is a requirement for any online business. Yeah. For sure. Well, I hope said security company is using Harness now. Tell us about the team that you're building. Do you have kind of like mantra has been inside of the Harness marketing org as first time CMO in the last six months or so. What are your priorities?(Speaker 2) What are you focusing on? How are you building the culture inside your team?(Speaker 1) Yeah, absolutely. Very fortunate to work alongside, hands down the most collaborative sales team that I have worked with. I've worked with some great sales teams throughout my career. Before I joined the company, Carlos De La Torre, who's our CRO, and I had a chat before(Speaker 1) I joined. It became super clear to me that it's going to be a very relationship built on trust and collaboration and that marketing is going to be truly seen and recognized as a partner to sales as long as we go and plan these things out and do things hand in hand and do it together. And so that was actually a big reason for why I joined. It sounds from the start that there's going to be a very strong TG culture, pipeline generation(Speaker 1) culture inside the company. And that in order for the sales reps and the SDRs here to be successful, you know, you need the full sort of like ecosystem. You need the marketing, you need the partners, you need the SDRs to all contribute in order to make the sales team successful. And so I would say that's kind of like the cultural landmark of everyone who I brought(Speaker 1) on is that everything that we're doing here is in service of the business and in service of the go-to-market organization. So there are other things that you can't 100% tie to the funnel, things that we do around developer relations and brand awareness and those kind of things. But at the same time, it helps you create enough aura in the market to start creating inbound and brand recognition. And it's something that I feel like(Speaker 1) materially moved the needle on in the last year and a half that I've been here. And then the second part is it actually came out of the offside, the first full team offside that I've been here. And then the second part is, you know, it actually came out of the offside. The first like full team offside that I have with the team about six months ago is that there are no shortcuts. There are no shortcuts to success, you know, that(Speaker 1) and those are the kind of people that I, you know, that I always tend to hire that I'm attracted to, is that people who have skill and expertise in their field, and people who are SMEs in their space, and are just generally all-star athletes at their jobs. But there are no shortcuts to success. And the intellectual curiosity(Speaker 1) that everybody needs to have and always going like a level or two deeper, you know, like the the inside joke here is, you know, right click new tab. Just when you think you've gotten to the answer of like right click new tab, it do be a little deeper. And, you know, that again again, at this stage in the company is just such a special time when the company's growing(Speaker 1) at the pace as it is. And nothing's perfect and there's always gonna be things that you have to make calls on and figure out. And sometimes things don't go your way that everyone here is resilient you know, again, resilient and is willing to chase like every ground ball that comes at them.(Speaker 1) Right. And, uh, yeah, that's, that's kind of like, those are kind of like the basics of the culture that we've created here. And yeah, I'm, uh, I'm incredibly proud of the team and everything that, you know, they they've accomplished so far, but more importantly are geared up to do in the next. That's awesome.(Speaker 1) Well, um, I feel like we heard a little baseball, baseball metaphor in there. Um, maybe we'll end, maybe we'll end kind of outside the, outside the work sphere and I know you're a baseball dad. Um, you've got amazing kids. We all know CMO is a crazy stressful job. What are some of your pieces of advice for CMOs who may or may not be parents,(Speaker 1) but just in general, keeping that drive, making sure that you have enough outputs outside of work, as well as just being able to stay curious. How do you keep the engine going? For me, I'm very fortunate to be a dad to three great kiddos. you know, very fortunate to have a very supportive spouse who supports all my you know crazy endeavors and commitment(Speaker 1) Yeah, I think you know just comes down to like balance and prioritization You know, I remember someone told me years ago There's like a few buckets in your life. Like there's a ward bucket, there's a family bucket, there's a hobby bucket, and then there's a sleep bucket.(Speaker 1) Right? And that's it. Those are the four buckets that you really have. Or I guess you could say friends and family. But for me, the work buckets and the family buckets are like the two sort of like non-negotiable buckets, you know, that's where I'm always going to invest(Speaker 1) the most time and effort. And it's really, you know, just like, how do you properly balance the two? You know, it's a give and take, you know, it's not, it's choppy, you know, it's not quite as consistent that you want to be. But for me personally, you know, right now, the like hobby and free time bucket, you know, that's the one that I'm kind of like negotiating on.(Speaker 1) Right. And be more flexible on. Because, you know, for me personally right now, like with the stuff that the kids are doing and you know, they, they don't get younger, you know, and the time with them is limited. I heard this like crazy stuff. It's like, just shook me the other day. You know, you spend 80% of your time with your kids before the age of 12.(Speaker 1) All right. Cause then they kind of taper off and they go off and they start doing their own thing and you want them to. So right now I'm in that golden age where they actually still want to hang out with me and do things together and watch me play sports and be a big part of their lives. Then my work is again, you guys know, I feel a great sense of responsibility to the business. I feel a great sense of responsibility to my team.(Speaker 1) You know, the people that I bring on here, I'm very invested in their personal success and professional success. And so, yeah, there's a sub that you're gonna have to leave on the table in favor of the things that you wanna prioritize for yourself.(Speaker 1) And that's kind of like how I letter out my decisions. So, um, um, but yeah, it's balance, just balance and prioritization and, you know, not letting any of the buckets get too empty. Love it. I love that. Well, uh, this would be great. Um, really appreciate you going on the journey with us and sharing some wisdom with the folks listening and yeah, just so much to draw from on your journey and excited to hear the response.(Speaker 1) So cheers. Yeah, cheers to you guys. Love the collaboration over the years. You guys are absolutely world class and I'm incredibly inspired by the team you all built and some of the projects that we worked on over the years and the stuff that you guys are putting out right now.(Speaker 1) It's top notch. Great job.(Speaker 5) Cheers!(Speaker 4) Great to see you, man. Yeah, great to see job. Cheers. Great to see you, man. Yeah, great to see you.(Speaker 3) Yeah, great to see you.(Speaker 2) If you're listening and enjoyed the show, definitely make sure to follow, subscribe, and share.(Speaker 1) And follow Gleb on his journey of harness. And follow Gleb on his journey of harness.(Speaker 2) See you next time.
