The Parts That Didn't Make LinkedIn.

57th out of 65.

I grew up in a tiny town in western New York. I was a terrible high school student. I graduated 57th out of 65 kids in my class.

Around the same time, my family went bankrupt. My parents separated, and I ended up sleeping on a cot in the corner of my mom's new apartment.

I enrolled in community college and got straight A's my first semester.

Then I wrote a letter to the University of Tampa. The message was pretty simple: I screwed around in high school. My family had been through some difficult times. But look at what I'm doing now. Give me a chance.

They let me in.

I still remember opening that acceptance letter and crying with my mom.

Senior year, 2004 — Packers jersey and cheesehead.

Class two days a week. Work the other five.

My student loans covered tuition, but not room and board. So I arranged all my classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and worked the other five days at Enterprise Rent-A-Car to pay rent.

In whatever free time I had, I taught myself affiliate marketing. I built hundreds of websites, experimented with SEO and Google AdWords, and learned through trial and error.

I got pretty good at it.

I graduated at the height of the Great Recession. Jobs were hard to find, and I wasn't having much luck.

So I built a networking website for recent graduates in the same situation.

The Tampa Bay Times wrote about it. I told the reporter that renting cars wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Enterprise nearly fired me for that quote.

Not long afterward, I landed a job as an Internet Marketing Specialist at Medi-Weightloss.

I'd finally found a way to get paid for something I'd taught myself to do.

Tampa Bay Times feature on wejustgraduated.com.

Found on Craigslist.

I was constantly browsing Craigslist looking for digital marketing clients.

One afternoon, I saw a job posted by Steve Allen, CEO of iDatix. We spoke that afternoon, I interviewed that night, and I had an offer the next day.

Good timing. That same day, the CMO at Medi-Weightloss found my resume on the printer.

At iDatix, I combined everything I'd learned in affiliate marketing with what Jon Miller was teaching at Marketo. We became customer #23.

I built our inbound marketing engine and positioned the company around lean manufacturing, bringing in industry expert Bill Wedel to help tell the story.

I read everything I could about manufacturing and, at 25, found myself speaking to rooms full of manufacturing executives about their own industry.

Marketing grew from 10% to 85% of revenue, and the company went from roughly $1 million to $5 million.

Speaking at the 2012 Marketo Summit while at iDatix.

What is cash burn???

Organic Motion recruited and moved me to New York City. They'd raised $10 million to build markerless motion capture technology.

A few weeks in, I was building the new website when I noticed engineers around me with tears in their eyes. The CEO had just laid off a big part of the team.

I was still pretty junior and hadn't even thought to ask about burn rate or runway before moving to NYC.

We had one meaningful customer: Warner Bros. Montreal. Leadership thought we were competing with traditional motion capture systems. The problem was, our technology wasn't accurate enough.

So I called our customer.

Turns out, he wasn't using our technology to replace traditional motion capture. He was using it to preview scenes before spending money on expensive studio time.

That changed everything.

I brought him on as a consultant, built a case study around his workflow, and mailed it with handwritten notes to 50 game studios. I personally ran more than 30 demos.

We landed Disney and Ubisoft, expanded into universities, and grew revenue from roughly $1 million to $4 million over two years.

But eventually, I realized we were running out of market. The marketing was working. There just weren't enough customers who needed what we sold.

I worked with the CEO on an exit, and DARI Motion acquired the company.

My brother and me, testing Organic Motion.

Hired on a trial.

Diligent was a $50 million public company preparing for a sale. A new leadership team had come in to get it ready. I was the CMO's first hire.

I was the most interesting candidate they interviewed, but also the least polished.

So they gave me a one-month contract to prove myself.

Diligent had grown almost entirely through word of mouth. They'd never sent a marketing email.

I implemented Marketo and built the measurement from scratch. The data showed there wasn't much demand to capture. Almost nobody was searching for board management software.

So I built outbound instead. Brought in Salesloft, hired SDRs, and built the team.

The contract turned into a full-time job. I became the youngest director in the company.

Insight Venture Partners acquired Diligent. I made some money.

Then the CMO left.

His replacement brought in her own people. And I'd made it easy for that to happen.

When colleagues asked for things I thought wouldn't work, I'd simply ignore them rather than explain why. I delivered results, but I didn't bring people along or communicate what I was doing.

I thought the results spoke for themselves.

They didn't.

I'd built a successful marketing operation, but I hadn't learned how to be an effective executive.

Being right isn't enough.

The original Marketo implementation group at Diligent.

Dinner with Jason.

After Diligent, I had dinner with Jason Thompson, the CMO at SecurityScorecard.

He hired me to lead digital. Eventually, I ran all of demand generation.

Unlike my previous stops, the market, messaging, and positioning were already working. The challenge was scaling demand generation.

The company was growing fast, but its marketing infrastructure hadn't kept up. Leads were being handed out on spreadsheets, sometimes days after someone raised their hand.

I connected Marketo, Salesforce, LeanData, MadKudu, and Salesloft. We went from days of delay to personalized sales cadences in under 30 seconds.

We also rebuilt the brand and website in three months, winning a Hermes Award.

Jason, Phil Marshall in product marketing, and I worked closely together. The company grew from roughly $6 million to $30 million.

Eventually, all three of us moved on.

But we'd work together again. More than once, actually.

And somewhere along the way, we became good friends.

With Jeremiah Bird, our designer, celebrating our Hermes Award at SecurityScorecard.

The text on vacation.

I joined Electric as Head of Marketing. I'd led marketing before, but this was my first time doing it at a high-profile, venture-backed startup.

I built the team, rebranded the company in three months, and grew marketing's contribution to revenue from under 10% to 43%.

Nine months in, I took my first vacation.

While I was away, I got a text from a CMO friend saying she was looking forward to working with me.

That's how I found out I had a new boss.

She was friends with the CEO and had become available. There was no search. I'd known the company would eventually hire a CMO. I just thought I had another year.

But try explaining that on a résumé.

It looks like you got demoted.

Fortunately, Jason had just become COO at IntSights and needed someone to take over marketing.

Our second time working together.

Weekend woodsball in an Electric jersey.

My first big exit.

When I joined IntSights, demand generation was working. We were getting the right buyers into proof-of-concept.

Then we'd lose. Usually to the incumbent, and usually with the most sophisticated security teams.

So I started interviewing customers.

Teams with dedicated threat intelligence specialists wanted the incumbent's depth. We weren't going to beat them at that game.

But security teams without those specialists had a different problem. They needed powerful threat intelligence without an entire team to manage it.

That's where we won.

So we repositioned the company around the customers we were actually built to serve, rather than the ones we wished we could win.

Marketing drove about half of revenue as IntSights grew from $7 million to $27 million.

Then Rapid7 acquired us for roughly $335 million.

I stayed long enough for my RSUs to vest.

By then, Jason had moved to BlueVoyant.

You can probably guess what happened next.

IntSights acquisition by Rapid7 for ~$335M.

30 people to 15.

Jason brought me into BlueVoyant. Not long after, he left, and I took over marketing.

Initially, it was another trial. Eventually, I was promoted to SVP of Marketing. To this day, nobody has served longer as BlueVoyant's head of marketing.

But this job was different.

I'd spent my career building marketing teams. At BlueVoyant, I was mostly being asked to shrink one.

We went from 30 people and a $9 million budget to 15 people and $3.5 million.

Despite the cuts, marketing continued driving roughly a quarter of revenue as the company grew from $50 million to $200 million.

I'm proud of that.

But repeatedly laying people off took a toll. These were people I'd hired, worked alongside, and cared about. Every round meant asking those who remained to do more with less.

When the CEO wanted to cut the team from 15 to 12, I decided it was time for someone else to lead it.

I left on good terms. The CEO sent a company-wide note recognizing my contributions and how much stronger the brand had become.

I'd spent most of my career building things.

I was ready to build again.

The first drug was money and status.

For most of my life, I measured myself by my career.

My aunt still tells the story of asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. My answer was "Rich."

From 18 to 30, I didn't touch alcohol or drugs. I worked constantly, determined to prove everyone who had ever doubted me wrong.

I was going to be somebody.

When I moved to New York, drinks after work became drinks every night. Eventually, drugs followed.

But I kept showing up. Kept performing. Kept getting promoted.

Until I couldn't.

After BlueVoyant, I went from choosing between two executive offers to losing two jobs and checking myself into rehab in September 2025.

I'd spent my entire career terrified of failure. Ironically, that fear had become part of what was destroying me.

I've had to confront things about myself I'd spent a lifetime avoiding, including how much of my identity I'd built around money, status, and other people's approval.

I'm still ambitious. I still love marketing. But I'm learning that my career doesn't define my worth.

I don't have it all figured out. And I'm done pretending I do.

Read the full story →

My LinkedIn post: What fighting a drug addiction taught me about B2B marketing.

Now

I'm a partner at Factor Rocks, helping B2B technology companies solve growth and go-to-market challenges.

I'm also spending a lot of time experimenting with AI tools. It reminds me of the early days, teaching myself affiliate marketing and building websites. That same curiosity, the same excitement about figuring things out.

I still love marketing. I still like hard problems. And I still want to build things that matter.

But I'm no longer trying to prove I'm somebody.

I'm trying to build a life I actually enjoy living.

Phil Marshall, Jason Thompson, and me. Three companies together.

Let's talk.

If you want to talk about any of it, I'm here. jbeaton04@gmail.com

Message me on LinkedIn