My Story: Insanely Curious

The PhD Years

I spent over 15 years doing Biomedical Research on the classic tenure professor track. My Ph.D. was awarded in 2001 from the University of Alabama-Birmingham where I worked on African Trypanosomes and how humans evade these pathogens.

Have you ever heard of Tsetse Fly? Apparently, they hurt like hell when they bite.

They pass along this disease to humans and cattle resulting in African Sleeping Sickness, a terribly debilitating disorder that affects much of sub-Saharan Africa. You can read some of my research here.

After grad school, I went to work for Dr. Jeff Esko at the University of California-San Diego where I spent a few years working on Toxoplasma. You may have heard about this little nasty, it’s the reason pregnant women can’t change the kitty litter and may even turn humans into puppets!

I later shifted to researching Type I Diabetes and its effects on the liver for my post-doctoral research publishing scientific research papers like this one in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals.

I am eternally grateful to Dr. Esko. In particular, he taught me the value of being a great writer and communicator. We often edited manuscripts together going back and forth more than 20 times before sending them to publication; even after 10 edits they would look like a river of red ink.

Presentation slides were only allowed to have words in 48 font (5–8 words max per slide!) and you had to practice presenting them as if to a hostile audience over and over again until you were unflappable.

Jeff also taught me to embrace failure as a positive step (e.g., we learned what not to do) and to keep experimenting until we got to an answer that was defensible to our scientific peers.

You’ll find references to the scientific method and scientific thought processes throughout this blog. Using concepts like Data Analysis, First Principles, Questioning Results, Changing One Variable at a Time, and Thinking Like a Scientist are some of the big themes I hope to share with the world.

The SEO Years

In 2011, I left the lab and my career path to join the “private industry” world for a company named Scientist Solutions as their Chief Scientific Officer. While there, I learned about websites, SEO, Ad Networks, Online Sales, and how to run a business.

As fate would have it, I also met my great friend and future business partner Mark Walker, while he worked for us as a consultant.

Mark and I went on to found Red Funnel Consulting, an SEO and content creation company focused on the Health Sciences, and operated a blog called How To Sell To Scientists, which brought in many of our first clients including TubeWriter and Sigma-Aldrich (now part of ThermoFisher).

The Founder/CEO Years

To be honest, Mark and I didn’t know we were founding a SaaS company. We just decided to build an iPad app (back when that was “a thing”). That app went on to become FatStax which changed Red Funnel from an SEO company to a SaaS company seemingly overnight.

The concept was simple. Help salespeople in the life sciences get easy access to all the products they sold to scientists on an iPad so they could easily find them when they were meeting with scientists (like me!) in the lab.

Mark was previously the Head of Sales at Invitrogen, which became one of the largest publicly held Health Sciences companies in the world, so we knew sales and buying products.

What we didn’t know was code.

I’m pretty certain we traded our first “coder” a laptop to get the prototype of our first app up and running. This was no VC-backed start-up. Just two dudes with no idea what we were doing and a whole lot of dumb determination.

We built our own everything.

On the Sales and Marketing side, I taught myself WordPress for Websites, Marketing Automation (Awebber, Marketo, MailChimp, Act-On, Eloqua, Hubspot), CRM (Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, PipeDrive), and more SEO products like SEMRush, Ahrefs, Moz and too many to count.

Along the way, we built up a pretty astonishing client list including multi-nationals like ThermoFisher, Pentair, Corning, CCM Hockey, and AO Smith. To this day, it still amazes me they chose us over the competition and I’m eternally grateful.

Importantly for this blog, we were invited to countless sales kick-offs where I personally trained 10,000s of B2B sellers on using sales tools on mobile devices to close more deals. This type of app went on to become the SaaS vertical known as “Sales Enablement”, which is now valued in the billions and used ubiquitously by sellers in all verticals to succeed at their jobs.

As acting CEO, I learned all the ins and outs of building a SaaS company. From Accounting to Investors to Code Debt (my personal nightmare) to Selling and Marketing.

We were also fortunate to persuade some amazing people to join us who all seem to have gone on to have amazing careers of their own!

As the sales enablement space grew, we worked with CMOs and Sales Leaders across a wide range of verticals. I also became friends with successful entrepreneurs and other CEOs inside SaaS companies and heard their perspectives, which will color what you read and see on this site.

The CMO Years

Ultimately, we sold FatStax to Bigtincan Holdings, a much larger competitor in our space (You can read all about the deal here).

The process of selling a SaaS company was probably one of the most nerve-wracking things I’ve ever been through (though I think Mark handled it all in stride as always). Please don’t try this on your own, I beg you. Hire someone knowledgeable!

What do you do with a founder/CEO after you buy his company?

You make him head of Marketing of course.

Huh?

Yep, that’s what happened. I became the SVP of Marketing and ultimately the CMO of a publicly traded software company.

During my 4 year tenure, we grew revenue by 52%, 53%, 48%, and 126% respectively with a mixture of organic and M&A-led growth. 

I led an amazing team that started with 3 people and grew to 22 during that 4-year span.

We negotiated, bought, and installed millions of dollars of MarTech Software, which I plan to go into depth about on this site so you can learn from my mistakes and wins.

We overhauled the Brand with new guidelines, launched a lightning-fast new website, sponsored events all over the world, fought our way through COVID-19, generated a pipeline in the $100s of millions, and wrote thousands of words of content (all SEO optimized of course!)

From a global perspective, I saw thousands of CMOs, Sales Leaders, and Founders succeed.

I heard their stories.

I analyzed how they did it with the skills I learned as Ph.D. 

I looked at them through the lens of a Founder and CEO.

I studied their Marketing Strategies as a CMO.

That’s when I decided to leave and create this site. 

To give you the insights from the inside.  

To review software.

To teach you how to think like a scientist and question everything.

To share some of my favorite books and podcast with you.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading!