A lot of practical tips for anyone building community from one of the industry's veterans. If you're going to love it, let's dive in. Scott, welcome to the show.

Thank you, David. Glad to be here.

Very excited to dive into your extensive experience in community and marketing. We kick off if you could just share a little bit about yourself and your background and how you came to running community and marketing at HubSpot today.

Sure. I think throughout my career, I tell people that most of my career is based on highway 101 in Silicon Valley. Throughout most of my career, community has kind of just pulled me back in. I think that when I came out here, originally I was working at Apple on a lot of their marketing programs and Apple started something called eWorld, which was a joint venture between AOL and Apple. So in eWorld, I worked on a lot of marketing for them. Think about eWorld, it was an AOL interface that was redesigned. There was an AOL technology that was redesigned by Apple. Everything that AOL had, eWorld had, and we were responsible for really using eWorld and making it the community of service for Apple users. After Apple, I worked on a project with AOL. Gets a little confusing here called Two Market. That was one of the first e-commerce initiatives. But since I was at AOL, community always has a play in everything. So I started working on a lot of their community initiatives, both in terms of the AOL service, but as well as some of the internet properties they bought as well. I can talk more about that. Then I went to Borders. The reason I wanted to share the story a little bit here about Borders is because Borders had 200 stores. This was back in the mid-90s and basically we decided to leverage those stores and they're in store events and put them on the internet. So similar to what Bevy offers today, we had to build a lot of it ourselves. Each store had, whether it was somebody reading a book or whether somebody was sharing music or video. So we put that on the internet as well. Over time I ended up at Intuit and at Intuit it was hired to launch their e-commerce site and their digital marketing. But now you're going to see a theme here is we came up with the idea of, hey, what if we start this community? The business problem we were trying to solve there was when I ran the e-commerce site, every product manager, every product marketing person wanted me to create content for them on the e-commerce site. And I said, unless you're going to pay, you can't play. I didn't have the budget to create all that content for all their products. And then I kind of remembered about my AOL experience. And so we did a skunk works project with community and that really blossomed to two or three million people. And then worked at Google and then Marchetto. Marchetto is interesting because they basically wanted to create a platform for their marketing nation. And it wasn't marketing nation at that time, it was just people that attended conferences. And so we ended up creating, I guess from a marketers perspective, you could call kind of the customer marketing retention platform. But really what was on it was community again, learning, academy, partner program, and that was the partner program and support. And that was really kind of like, ah, there's an aha here for all the different things that a customer does in terms of how they interface with a company, how they build their own business. So we created this central portal. And then we can talk about this later, but I realized that it's less so today, but at that time there's kind of a glass ceiling for community, community managers or community people. And even though I was doing all this other stuff, I was still branded as a community person. And when was this? This was 2017. So it wasn't 2016. Okay. So, you know, I loved what I was doing. It was great that we had a lot of success building the marketing nation platform. We had user groups on there as well. But when I was looking for jobs, I wanted to do more than be a community manager. And so I decided that to leverage my knowledge of Marketo, since I was at Marketo, my knowledge of Salesforce and lean into growth marketing for a few years. And I really believed at the time that growth marketing would have a bigger play in terms of community and can talk a little bit about how I think about community as a product. And then when I was at Udacity, I kind of came back to community as I was running their growth marketing programs. But the problem we were trying to solve there is they had millions of students, but we also built out this human ecosystem of mentors and structures, reviewers. And so how do you bring the students together as well as them? And then we get to HubSpot. And HubSpot interested in me because John Dick, who runs his SPP of marketing. He used this phrase that said, we don't want to be customer-first and not function out. And that phrase really resonated with me because the position we talked about was, how can I join the team in a customer engagement role? Community is a big part of that. But create this seamless and integrated experience for our customers, as well as leveraging the growth side. How do you bring in the moneyball aspect to this and really think about how analytics plays into building a community, building user groups, building an events platform, et cetera. And so that's how I got to where I am

today. That's an incredible journey. It's like the who's who of tech companies and both B2B and NB2C. It's really incredible to see how many different, the kind of like variety of experiences that you have. There are some people that even had on the podcast who have stayed at one company for 10 plus, sometimes 15 plus years. And you've really had the opportunity to kind of bounce around for a couple of years at different companies. I think you're an into it for seven years, which is one of your longer experiences. Was that intentional that you feel like you want to kind of experience different companies and move around a lot? Or is that just kind of how it played

out? That's a really good question. And there is a method to the madness and there's pros and cons. And so the way I think about it is when I was in my twenties, I tried to learn as much as possible. Actually, I should back this up. When I was in my twenties, I realized that I wasn't really exposed to different parts of the world. So I decided that in my twenties, I wanted to live overseas as much as possible. In my thirties, I decided to probably go to too many schools and really get as much experience in different ways that people learn. So I have an MBA, I have also a degree in psychology. And then in my forties, just because it started happening anyway, was how can I learn about different companies in their culture? And so there was definitely been like, it's been a plan. Some of the things I've learned early in life is if you write it down, it's going to happen. And so a lot of this stuff I wrote down and said, these are my goals moving forward. Now that I have kids and we talked about your child before we went live, I try and think about what I can give to them, whether it's two-block, two-year increments or five-year increments, et cetera.