Growth & Acquisition Panel: The Hidden Strategies That Drive Spectacular Growth for High-Growth Companies & Big Brands

I’m a CMO who loves bringing together the power of brand storytelling with the efficiency and scale of growth marketing. I specialize in helping well-known B2C2B brands grow both their self-serve subscription and direct sales channels. I’m a passionate leader who rallies teams behind a shared vision for how the marketing organization can shape and impact a brand with customers and employees. ----- More about me: Most CMOs specialize in either B2B OR B2C products. I've done both ✌️ Thanks to my experience marketing products in B2B (Salesforce), B2C (PlayStation), and B2C2B (Dropbox, Crunchbase, NVIDIA), I've learned how marketing succeeds in both the consumer and enterprise worlds. I enjoy crafting a message for CIO's just as much as I do, for e-sports gamers. ----- Most CMOs specialize in either self serve OR direct sales go to market motions. I've done both of those. Hey, I've even done channel! ✌️+ 👆. There's something gratifying about unlocking the scale and speed that only self serve growth marketing can provide. But it's also fulfilling to build a demand generation and sales enablement engine that keeps sales teams busier than they've ever been. ----- I feel extremely lucky to have experienced these very different worlds. And even luckier that in my current role, leading the marketing & growth team at Crunchbase, I get to learn new lessons from an amazing group of people who have unique experiences and ideas to share.

Brian Kotlyar leads Demand Generation and Growth Marketing at Intercom - a customer messaging platform that drives growth across the customer lifecycle. In this role, Brian is responsible for marketing and operations teams that drive new and expansion revenue. Prior to this, he led Demand Generation at Sprinklr where he helped scale from a $50M valuation to $1.8BN. Brian's first experience in SAAS was as VP of Marketing at Dachis Group (acquired by Sprinklr). He specializes in building high-performing SAAS marketing teams, and in his spare time, he is an avid cook and NBA fan.

Varun Kohli is the co-founder and Chief Business Officer (CBO) at MachEye, an AI-driven Autonomous Intelligence stealth-mode startup. He joined MachEye from Symantec where he was the head of Global Demand, PMO and Strategic Marketing. Varun has held leadership positions in marketing, product management, and product development at both startups and large companies, and is on the advisory board of many startups. Both he and his work have been featured in major publications such as Daily Mail, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, MarketWatch, and USA Today. Varun has appeared in broadcast outlets such as NBC’s The Today Show, MSNBC, FOX, Kron4, ABC, and CBS. Prior to joining MachEye, Varun has worked at 9 companies, 8 of which have been acquired. These include successful exits such as Skycure (acquired by Symantec), IronPort Systems (acquired by Cisco), CipherTrust (acquired by Secure Computing then McAfee, which was later acquired by Intel) and ArcSight, which was acquired by HP after being the only company in the valley to go IPO in 2009. Varun earned his Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati, India, a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of California, Riverside and studied marketing at University of California, Berkeley.

Lance is the founder and CEO of Closed Loop. Closed Loop specializes in helping high-growth companies realize a massive profit through online advertising on Google AdWords, Facebook, programmatic display and other channels. Closed Loop has worked with numerous high-growth brands and managed over $500M in digital ad spend for our clients. Lance is also a mentor for 500startups, a 3X founder and bootstrapped Closed Loop to over $5M in ARR.