I've spent more than 20 years building brands, stories, and go-to-market machines for other companies. Startups, scale-ups, agencies, one of the most beloved companies in SaaS.
And in all that time, I never once built a home for my own story.
That changes today. Welcome to scottsalkin.com.
But the "why now" won't make sense without the "how I got here." So grab a coffee. I promise there's a point at the end, and it might be the most important thing I've ever worked on.
Cisco: a 102-degree fever and the best decision I ever made
Cisco was my first job out of school, and I still remember how badly I wanted it. This was Cisco. The brand. The company everyone in tech wanted on their resume. When they invited me to interview in Raleigh, North Carolina, I got on the plane with a 102-degree fever. I landed to 30-degree weather and a few inches of snow, which, for a kid coming out of college in San Diego, might as well have been the Arctic. I sweated and shivered my way through the interviews.
I got the job.
But I didn't dive straight into carrying a bag. I joined 25 other new hires in a year-long training program in Raleigh, packed up my life in San Diego, and moved across the country. And honestly? It was one of the best experiences of my life. The friendships I built in that program are still with me today, decades later.
Looking back, that year set the stage for everything: my future as a marketer, as a CEO, and my deep belief in the power of partnerships and relationships. The seed that eventually became Allbound was planted in Raleigh, I just didn't know it yet.
Cisco also wired something into me that I've never been able to shake: I started in sales, not marketing. When you learn the business from the quota side first, you never forget that every activity in a company either helps revenue happen or it doesn't. I've sat through hundreds of marketing meetings since where beautiful work got celebrated with zero connection to pipeline, and every time, the Cisco sales kid in me winced.
NetPro: the people who believed in me before I did
From Cisco I jumped into startup life at NetPro Computing (later acquired by Dell Software), and I'll be honest: I didn't know what I didn't know.
What won me over wasn't just the opportunity. It was the leadership. People like Kevin Hickey and Christine McDermott, who took a chance on me and then kept handing me things I had no business being trusted with yet. We were PE-backed by JMI, running lean, and we didn't have the tool stack teams take for granted today. We were some of the very first users of Eloqua, figuring out marketing automation while it was still being invented.
So I wore every hat I could find. Partner marketing. Marketing pipeline. Community and events. I taught myself graphic design and HTML because there was nobody else to do it. And somewhere in all that chaos, I stopped thinking of myself as a person with a job title and started thinking of myself as someone who could figure things out.
That's the thing about being a generalist that nobody tells you: it's not about being mediocre at many things. It's about learning to see the whole field. The specialists optimized their lane. The generalists made sure all the lanes actually led somewhere.
When NetPro was acquired, it was Kevin and Christine's belief in me that gave me the confidence to do something slightly insane: start my own company.
IDS: a laptop and a dream
In 2007, I started IDS Technology Marketing with, quite literally, a laptop and a dream.
I was dangerous enough in sales, marketing, partnerships, copywriting, graphic design, HTML, even Flash (RIP), that I could pretty much do everything myself. And in the beginning, I had to. I remember emailing absolutely everyone I knew, and plenty of people I didn't, trying to scrape together pipeline and land those first customers.
Eventually, it started working. Then it started really working, and we grew fast.
But here's the part that shaped me most: we weren't just an agency. We ran an "outsourced inside sales team" alongside the creative work, because our clients told us exactly what they wanted, and it wasn't pretty campaigns. It was meetings. Pipeline. Bookings. "But the design was great" bought me nothing when the leads didn't show up.
Agency life also taught me efficiency the hard way. When you live on margins, every wasted hour and every five-step process that should've been two steps comes straight out of your ability to make payroll. Efficiency was never a value on a poster for me. It was rent.
Allbound: triplets, not twins
Allbound, founded in 2014, was my first real venture into SaaS. And once again... I didn't know what I didn't know.
I applied to an accelerator, got accepted, and moved to San Francisco for six months with my then wife and our newborn twins to be embedded in the magic of Silicon Valley. It was incredible. It was also, let's be honest, like having triplets instead of twins, because the startup was my new baby, and it was the neediest of the three.
The idea was simple and personal: nobody should sell alone. I had a vision for what the company would be, and then the market did what markets do and helped guide us somewhere even better. We landed great customers, and I genuinely believe we changed the partner software category with our design, our go-to-market, and most importantly, the results our customers were seeing.
As my family kept growing, I made one of the harder and better decisions of my career: I hired a full-time CEO, and he helped guide Allbound to a PE exit.
And the thesis at the heart of Allbound, that the best outcomes come from the right pairing rather than the strongest individual, turned out to matter way beyond channel sales. Hold that thought.
Gainsight: the major leagues
I joined Gainsight because of what they were building, and I don't just mean software. Nick Mehta, Anthony Kennada, Allison Pickens, Dan Steinman... this was the major leagues. They weren't building a product. They were building the customer success category itself: a career track, a profession, a community. I still remember people telling us they couldn't wait to become customers. Think about that. When's the last time you heard that about B2B software?
I was there for the ride from $30M to nearly $300M, through our acquisition by Vista Equity Partners and our own acquisitions of four other companies, eventually serving as CMO. I got to learn every corner of running a SaaS company at every stage and every level.
And it was from that CMO seat that I got a front-row view of something I don't think our industry has honestly reckoned with yet.
What AI actually did to the people doing the work
Here's what was promised: AI would make our work better and give us our time back.
Here's what I actually watched happen, inside our own walls, across our customers, and across nearly every GTM team I know: AI made it possible to produce more, so we produced more. More content. More campaigns. More variations. More channels. The bar for volume went up. The bar for quality often went down. And every hour "saved" got instantly refilled with more work.
But the workload isn't even the worst part.
The worst part is what it's done to people. I've lost count of the conversations I've had over the past few years with genuinely talented marketers quietly asking some version of the same question: "If AI can do what I do... what am I for?"
That is not a productivity problem. That's an identity crisis. And it's happening inside teams that look, from the outside, like they're crushing it at AI adoption.
The tools got exponentially more powerful. The people got more stressed, felt more replaceable, and in a lot of cases, became less proud of their work. Something in this equation is badly broken.
So why the website, and why now?
Because I think we've gotten the AI and humans thing fundamentally wrong, and I want a place to work through what getting it right looks like, out loud, with the people living it every day.
I don't believe the answer is AI instead of humans. I've seen what that produces: an infinite supply of content nobody trusts, made by teams stripped of the judgment that made their work matter in the first place. And I don't believe the answer is humans resisting AI, because that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, and been rebuilt as a bigger, faster ship.
I believe the answer is the same lesson that's been chasing me since Raleigh: from the friendships in that Cisco training program, to the leaders at NetPro who bet on me, to the entire premise of Allbound. The best outcomes have never come from the strongest individual player. They come from the right partnership, each side doing what only it can do. Machines bringing speed, scale, and pattern recognition. Humans bringing taste, judgment, empathy, and accountability to the outcomes that actually matter, which, as the Cisco sales kid in me will remind you, means revenue and relationships.
The best work has never been a solo. It's always been a duet.
And yes... I'm building something new in exactly that spirit. I'm not ready to share the details just yet. But if any of this hit a nerve, if you're a marketer, founder, or GTM leader trying to figure out how to make AI make your work better instead of just busier, you're exactly who I'm building it for. You're the reason this site exists.
What you'll find here
I'll be writing weekly: on go-to-market that actually ties back to sales, on efficiency as a survival skill, on thriving as a generalist in a world that keeps trying to shove everyone into narrower lanes, and on what AI + humans should really look like. Real opinions. Real scar tissue. No filler.
Because ironically, in a world drowning in AI-generated content, the most valuable thing I can offer is the one thing a machine can't: what I've actually lived.
If that sounds worth your time, subscribe below. Everything I'm building toward will show up here first.
Let's get to work. Together.
Scott