The OG B2B Growth Hacker/Jon Miller ~ Career Pivot, Physics, Dad Joke Game - Spark of Ages Ep. 1

Prepare to be enthralled as we journey through the fascinating life and impressive career of Jon Miller, a marketing innovator who's left an indelible impression on the marketing tech space. Known for his pioneering strides and insightful writings on marketing automation, John's unique voyage from a physics degree holder to a co-founder of a thriving company is nothing short of inspirational. This episode promises a unique blend of laughter and learning, as we engage in an entertaining contest against AI in crafting dad jokes and delve into the seminal moments of Jon's career.

We explore the evolution of marketing strategy, taking a cue from Jon's journey to success, which is a remarkable tale intertwining multiple trends, calculated risks, and impeccable timing. Discussing the business complexities he faced, we delve into how crucial the right product market fit, internal execution and a dash of good luck are to achieving business success. This is not just about the serious stuff though – our humorous side takes center stage as we challenge ourselves to out-do an AI in conjuring dad jokes!

In our invigorating conversation with Jon, the topics are as limitless as they are intriguing. From his career guidance to his awe for the magic inherent in technology, we touch on an array of subjects designed to pique your interest. Jon’s anticipation for the potential of AI 2.0, his insights into the power of interactive content in a cookie-less world, and his belief in personalized content as a relationship builder with customers, are all insights you don't want to miss. So, buckle up and get ready for a laughter-filled, knowledge-packed episode sure to leave you inspired and informed.

https://www.position2.com/podcast/

Transcript

Rajiv: 0:07

Hello and welcome to the Spark of Ages Podcast, where we're going to talk to game-changers of all kinds about their big world-shaping ideas and what sparked them. I'm your host, rajiv Parikh, and I'm the CEO and founder of Position Square, a digital marketing company based in Palo Alto. So, yes, I'm a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, but I'm also a business news junkie and a history nerd. I'm fascinated by how big world-changing movements go from the spark of an idea to an innovation that reshapes our lives. In every episode, we're going to do a deep dive with our guests about what led them to their own Eureka moments and how they're going about executing it. And, perhaps most importantly, how do they get other people to believe in them so that their idea can also become a spark for the ages. This is the Spark of Ages Podcast. In addition to myself, we have our producer, sandeep, who will occasionally chime in to make sure we don't get too in the weeds with tech jargon.

Sandeep: 1:07

Yep, that's me, man. I'm really excited about this interview because we do interactive technology, so I'm going to pick Jon's brain about interactive stuff.

Rajiv: 1:16

Jon is a marketing rock star. He's an entrepreneur with three exits and he's the guy who wrote the book on the latest innovations in marketing technology. Literally, he's the author of Demandbase's definitive guide to ABM, slash ABX and Marketo's definitive guide to marketing automation.

Sandeep: 1:33

That's very definitive and spoiler alert to our listeners. The guy that wrote the book on B2B marketing might actually be leaving marketing.

Rajiv: 1:40

We'll get into that. But, bottom line, he's an innovator and defining voice in this field and we're going to find out what sparks it. So, jon, it's really great to have you on the show. Thank you. There's so much for us to get into, so much to talk about. I first met you in 2006, I think, and this was your early days, when you were just at the beginning of Marketo, and so I'm really excited to have you here so many years later and be able to have you on this show and get your background and your spark out there.

Rajiv: 2:26

You've been on so many shows. You guys have your own show at Demandbase that you're frequently a host for. You're a pro at standing in front of crowds and getting your ideas and concepts out to the market. You're a domain expert, so much so that there are folks who in my team are such Marketo believers that they literally wear purple all the time. We think they bleed purple. And you've created your own categories and have been a true innovator. So today I want to go on a little bit of a different path than the ones you've gone down before. So let's start with the new path you're going on now. Tell our listeners your big news.

Jon Miller: 3:02

Yeah, sure. Well, I mean you and I have talked a little bit about pre-show. My role at Demandbase has sort of recently evolved. I've been the CMO at Demandbase for almost the last three years since we merged and engaged in Demandbase together. We've recently hired our new CMO here at Demandbase and I have taken on a role as sort of evangelist and consultant. So what's exciting about that is I get to continue to do what I love and talk to customers about what's happening in ABM and go to market and share best practices and do all that kind of stuff, and I also have a little bit of time to sort of be working on my next thing. And be candid, I don't know what that is yet at this point.

Sandeep: 3:47

I'm just curious about your emotions at this state like being sort of free in this new kind of freed state. Are you excited? Is there some nervousness, anxiousness, what are you sort of going through?

Jon Miller: 3:58

I'm excited to be excited, and what I mean by that is once I land on the thing I know I'll get really excited for whatever I choose and dive into that, and right now it's more of just like looking out at kind of a world of infinite possibilities. It could be anything. I mean, my next startup could be literally anything I want it to be.

Rajiv: 4:21

Yeah, this is not going to be like the next evolution in marketing. Potentially In your mind you have, like that Leonard Skinner song You're free as a bird, man, bird. Now I'm as free as a bird. Is that where you are?

Jon Miller: 4:35

It is, I mean I may not stay in MarTech, right? I mean, there's things that are really interesting on the sales side. There's B2C things. Ai is obviously so transformative that if I'm going to stay in tech, I mean obviously thinking about what AI can do, but I'm not even holding myself to stay in software. So we'll see what happens.

Rajiv: 4:54

You and I were just at a recent AI dinner. Right, and marketing is just blowing up. With regard to generative AI. The whole thing is transitioning and changing, so it's even hard to forecast where it's going to be in the next year or two.

Jon Miller: 5:08

Absolutely.

Rajiv: 5:09

You know we're going to take it back a little bit. So you have a degree from Harvard in physics. Here's a quote that was written on a profile piece about you that I found interesting. A career in physics is lucrative, said no one ever. However, you can take up physics, do a little bit of fusion research and then do stints and management consulting and eventually find your way to being a co-founder of a company that shapes the marketing tech space. Sounds weird, doesn't it? So I just wonder when you originally went into physics, is that just something that really interests you? Are you like a first principles type of person?

Jon Miller: 5:47

I was always fascinated with the big questions in physics Does the universe have an end and does it infinitely expand forever, or will it eventually contract? And so does time have a start and then a stop to it? You know just literally, questions about infinity sort of always kind of would blow my mind. You know other things like. You know time travel and you know if you could go faster than speed of light, does that mean you're going to go backwards in time?

Rajiv: 6:16

You would sit in general and just wonder about the nature of things.

Jon Miller: 6:19

Yeah, and really the big, big, big, big questions. You know, I actually even considered going. You know, one of the programs I applied to for college was a dual major in physics and philosophy, you know, and I loved the idea of kind of like how can you use science to just really understand kind of the way of the world? So I'd always assumed that I would, my career path would be in academia and I'd go and get a PhD. I spent my summers, I got a job at Lawrence Livermore National Law Labs, so that's where I was doing the fusion research. And then I actually got into a PhD program that I applied to my senior year and it was only sort of by sort of chance that I sort of started, you know, even considering, you know, other options.

Sandeep: 7:09

So I'm just curious what did this all come from Like? Was it from your parents? You know this desire to find the answer to the meaning of life, the universe of it and everything. Or was it just your own thinking?

Jon Miller: 7:19

It just always fascinated me. You know my dad was an attorney and my mom was a teacher, but you know, even my dad did a lot of teaching as well. So I will say I do always sort of say I come from a family of educators, so there may be some connection there. But yeah, the direct hard sciences was something that was fascinating, but yeah.

Rajiv: 7:43

I kind of think, like when you think, when you talk about being into math, right, and then going into marketing, so a lot of what people associated marketing, this is back in even in the mid 90s or even before. That is a lot of times the marketer, they come up with a brand, they come up with a story, they come up with a message and then it was a bit of a dark art to figure out if what you're doing is actually working or not. Right, and there's consumer advertising. We run TV ads and you do all these surveys and things. You didn't know if you're actually driving any revenue. So is that sort of like if you kind of play with it, if you think about that, is that what led you to say, hey, maybe marketing is kind of interesting?

Jon Miller: 8:24

Yeah, it was less direct than that. To be honest. I was doing my summer work at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. I got into a PhD program at MIT but I had looked at sort of the lives that the physics PhDs that I had been working with, the lives they had and they weren't researching time travel in the end of the universe and everything.

Jon Miller: 8:53

They were researching the stuff you can get paid to research, which is fusion and plasma dynamics and things like that, and I was going to end up going to MIT to research plasma dynamics. Wow, I was like I don't know, is that really what I got into this to do and always be looking to get the next grant and that kind of stuff. And at the same time there was always recruiting going on for management, consulting and investment banks and I was like, well, that seems pretty fun and I'll be a totally candid, I'm probably smarter than most of the people doing that, so why should they make more money? I actually got MIT to defer my admission for a year and I was like, well, let me just try this other kind of business world out. Because again, you got to remember, my mom was a teacher, my dad was a lawyer. I didn't come from even understanding what business was. I thought people go to offices and they seem to send faxes around, but I don't really know what they're doing.

Jon Miller: 9:55

I was like that's how little I knew.

Rajiv: 9:58

They push things around. So you're sitting here going, yeah, they're pushing some stuff around, I don't know if it's a real thing. And then you have this science experience. You're like, wow, they're just shilling for research grants and they're not getting to really pursue what they're passionate about.

Jon Miller: 10:12

And I was at that firm for a little over a year and because of my quantitative background I was sort of being put on the more analytical projects which led me to actually a boutique consulting firm called Exchange Partners. The founder of Exchange Partners had this really interesting methodology about how to use analytics to understand the value exchange between what you put into a customer and what a customer gives into you and how you create really valuable experiences that create more mutual value in the exchange. He realized that a lot of the recommendations from the methodology couldn't be implemented without technology, so he went and acquired an old marketing technology company that was originally called Exchange Applications. As you know, in comparison to us in the consulting firm Exchange Partners, that company was successful with, eventually rebranded as Exchange and had an IPO as a successful market company. So when I was getting ready to graduate business school in 1999, I mean, it was 1999, everybody's going to tech- it was crazy right it was the internet boom.

Rajiv: 11:27

99 was the crescendo of the internet boom 98 or 99. I mean, I got out of business school in 97 and I went in and I was like working at Sun and then I went to. Alta Vista Internet was just crazy maniacal.

Jon Miller: 11:42

So, you know, and I never thought about, oh, I'm going to have a career in tech. You know, I thought I'd probably go back to consulting after business school. But it was like, well, you got to have to work in tech and there was this company called Epiphany that was just down the street in Palo Alto and they were building a marketing technology product to compete with Exchange. You know this company that I sort of had a sister association with and somehow, despite the fact that I had zero experience in tech, I got a job as a product manager there, because I knew a little bit about the space.

Jon Miller: 12:15

You know I was in product management for a while there down myself, gravitating a little bit more to the product marketing side over the years, Right.

Rajiv: 12:22

Which makes sense. I mean you're more structured and more analytical, so you'd want to create products, right?

Jon Miller: 12:29

I mean you'd want to build things, yep, and so when we finally sold Epiphany in 2004, and it was sort of time to do something next, I've like, oh right, I've been doing this for a while. I think I'm ready to run marketing for a little tiny startup. I was interviewing at a couple of different places and at the same time that's when I was talking with Phil Fernandez, who had been the president of Epiphany. You know kind of the hey. You know there ought to be a company somewhere you know that sort of that's.

Jon Miller: 12:58

eventually those conversations became Marketo. It's a little indirect how I kind of navigated from physics into consulting into MarTech, but there is that kind of a common theme there, I think, of being analytical, being quantitative and kind of having like a systems orientation to the thinking.

Rajiv: 13:20

Well, I think it's boiling it down to its essence, right. So you know, when you think about some of the problems we dealt with before in marketing, we just couldn't measure. We couldn't measure what we were doing, right, like we were trying things out, we were hoping it worked. Sometimes we wonder was it the product, was it sales, was it what was marketing doing? And you got answers far later and it sounds like, jon, you, by putting an analytical mindset to it, you saw that need at Marketo to attach marketers more closely to revenue.

Jon Miller: 13:57

You know it always has bugged me. You know that. You know marketing doesn't have as much credibility and respect. You know, I was talking to a marketer the other day who was talking about how the fact that their CFO has some opinions on the brand and I asked this marketer if they had opinions on the accounting in return. That's right.

Jon Miller: 14:21

You know, but that's the nature of marketing. Everybody you know thinks that they can have an opinion on the brand and the marketing you know and whatnot. That's fine. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but not everybody understands the nuances of kind of what's actually happening in marketing as well. So I have definitely always sought to help marketing earn their seat at the revenue table, get more credibility, get respect. Part of that is by using the language of business and not the language of marketing. When you're kind of talking outside of you know the walls of your own, of your own department, and part of it is being analytical and quantitative.

Rajiv: 14:55

I think it was kind of revolutionary at the time. I mean, I was there at that time. I similarly started my company because I wanted to take an engineering approach to marketing and I wanted to show directly that what we were experimenting with was turning into actual revenue, and demand gen enabled that. And I think you took it a step further, even further, not just on the consumer side, but to the business side, where to make a sale it just takes longer and it takes more people to drive it and it's harder to measure. And I think you pioneered the notion of the revenue marketer, the notion of the power of inbound. I think it was one of the things you pushed.

Jon Miller: 15:35

I'm not going to take credit for pioneering all these things.

Rajiv: 15:38

I mean there are lots of other people, you're on my show, you're going to get all these things.

Jon Miller: 15:43

The Pedowitz group was talking about revenue marketing. Hubspot was obviously talking about inbound that was really later Come on now. Brian Carroll was talking about lead nurturing before I came along, but you put it together.

Jon Miller: 15:55

That's what I was sort of going to say is? You know, I think one of the things that I've always done really well in my career is to synthesize things together, and it goes back to that simplify and explain, combining multiple trends and patterns and things like that, see the big picture, see how the universe works, see if there's an end to the universe.

Rajiv: 16:15

With a philosophical framework.

Sandeep: 16:17

That's right.

Rajiv: 16:19

So then, like you had this, you had this great career at Marquette. Right, you built, you went through a lot of stuff and getting there, this is when, I think, you said your wife was pregnant and you're about to have your kid and you decided to do a startup. But you went through all that. You went through some amazing trials and tribulations this is never easy to sell a concept like this, you know. Then you got it to a point of success. How did that feel like to go through that whole set of motions? Right, there's a whole range of emotions. If your parents weren't in business before you heard about some of this from folks at Stanford, you got exposed to tons of business leaders. Was it what you expected?

Jon Miller: 16:58

Well, you know I mean, you've been a founder entrepreneur yourself you don't start a company thinking it's going to fail.

Sandeep: 17:07

Yeah.

Jon Miller: 17:07

Right. I mean you start a company with hopes and dreams, you know kind of, for this to success. That's going to happen and it's almost like you'd be naive to like. If you really knew how hard things are going to be along the way, probably nobody would do it.

Rajiv: 17:25

That's right.

Jon Miller: 17:27

So I don't want to say like, oh, I always knew Marketo was going to be successful, right, you know. But you kind of go into it assuming, yeah, we're onto something, we have a good idea here, yeah. What I'd appreciate at the time, though, is, frankly, how many things need to come together to really make a good success like Marketo. A lot of things, a lot of things got to line up right.

Sandeep: 17:51

What were some of the surprising elements that had to come together?

Jon Miller: 17:56

I think you just you really need the time to be right. You need to have really good product market fit, which is sort of related to that but kind of could be in separate and then you need great internal execution and I think if you don't have all three of those pillars you're not going to create a great company. When you're first starting companies, it's hard to kind of really see that Right. Even if I get to engage you which we'll talk about in a minute, and you know my company after Marketo, you know I'd argue in retrospect, if I look at it, timing was a little early, especially for how we were tackling ABM. That's right.

Jon Miller: 18:32

You know, partly because of that we never quite got product market fit exactly right, but I do think we brought really good execution to the table. Yeah, you know, but you add those together and engage. You was good, not great in terms of success.

Rajiv: 18:46

Yeah. So I mean, would you say, when you left, you got Marketo to a point of going public. You'd be up on stage at Dreamforce, right, the Salesforce Big Salesforce Conference, doing all these great discussions about how things are changing dramatically for marketers. You had your own big events that Marketo was putting out. You had a whole bunch of adherence to it. And then you said, well, I want to go and do something new, I want to start it myself, like in the last one.

Rajiv: 19:14

The first one, you were with Phil Fernandez, you know, and you kind of went with someone you knew or had some familiarity with because you were at a previous company with him, and then you went and started it with him. And then you know, there's this thing in your head saying, no, I got to do, I got to do my own thing. Or was it? You know what we're not doing? This method of marketing, right, and so we're going to go this way? Which, which? Which it was? Or was it both? Or was it just all these VCs saying, jon, if you start something, we're going to throw a bunch of money at you. We?

Jon Miller: 19:44

love you. You know I'll start with like a quick little you know anecdote. I was a guy named Clint Orem who was one of the founders and executive at Sugar CRM. He worked for me way back in the days at Epiphany. I remember having coffee with him in the early days of Marketo. When we just kind of get up and running, I'm like, hey, tell me your, your entrepreneur story. And he said something to me at the time. He's like you know, sugar CRM is far enough along now. We're a bigger company. It doesn't feel like my baby or my company anymore. It feels like a job, yeah. And I remember him saying that. So take that's in my brain.

Jon Miller: 20:21

Fast forward, nine years later at Marketo. We've had our IPO for a thousand people. I we've hired somebody else to be the CMO and you know I'm focusing on some other things and I realized this doesn't feel like my baby anymore. It feels like a job, yeah, and I wanted it. I was like I'd liked that. And those early days, you know, when it felt like you know, I had the excitement and energy of feeling it, you know, like my baby. So. So that was really the impetus of it, was I? I realized I loved just the start of experience and I wanted to go do that again. And coming off of the Marketo IPO, I mean I made less money probably than most people think, but I made well enough that the mortgage was paid and I didn't have to worry about some of the things I was worried about when we started Marketo, and so I had the sort of resources to be able to sort of say I can do this with me as the CEO lead, and I think I'm ready for that challenge.

Rajiv: 21:22

Yeah, I mean you had the big win. Right, you had a win. It was known as something that you created and you enabled or key part of, and you had the big win. And at a certain point with these, when a company gets large, they're running big studies and things take time and it's all about big coordination and it feels like it just takes a lot of process.

Rajiv: 21:43

Driving, you're talking, you can't just flip on a dime and try something new. You have some room too, but it's harder to move a machine and it just gets more fun to start the next thing, right. And so, like Engageo, was there, like some, this one insight that just said yeah, I got to do that.

Jon Miller: 22:00

Engageo started with I want to start a company. In some cases like where I am now the only difference then is I knew I wanted to start something in marketing, just marketing tech, because that was what I wanted to kind of continue. I had probably four or five different kind of ideas I was exploring, ranging from an ad tech solution to a machine learning based decisioning engine, to what we eventually decided to call ABM. I called it at the time kind of just more kind of targeted outbound. And then again a lot of interesting lunches with people where you learn things over time lunch with Maria Pergolino, who is the CMO. I think she was an Aptus at the time. She worked for me back at Marketo and she was like I really think you should do this ABM thing. It's hot, it's coming, everybody's talking about it, and so that sort of that, plus like getting some sort of signs that maybe the other ideas weren't as good, started getting me really narrowed in on kind of ABM as the right strategy.

Rajiv: 23:09

For everybody. For everybody who doesn't know, abm is account based marketing.

Sandeep: 23:13

Okay cool, I was nodding like I knew. I just kept nodding, but I didn't know.

Jon Miller: 23:17

Yeah, it's about focusing your marketing efforts on the big accompanies in a very specific, proactive way, as opposed to more broad based marketing. The analogy is a lot of broad based marketing is like fishing with the net. Abm is more like fishing with the spear.

Rajiv: 23:33

The idea of this is that, instead of just throwing out a whole bunch of messages and hoping something comes up, you really target a company. And when you target a company or target certain types of companies at certain levels of scale, there's just a different way that you sell, because it's not you're not selling to a single person, it's not you're selling. You have to get a whole bunch of people to coordinate their action, to make a decision right. Anything that costs hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars or could potentially completely change the company, it requires a lot of people to get aligned by it.

Jon Miller: 24:07

And ABM also brings more sense of focus. Yes, so you know you sort of like I can't like you have like it's a thesis that you need to be personal and relevant and targeted to be effective in today's crowded market, and you can't do that for everybody. So a lot of ABM is just how do I focus my limited resources onto fewer things and therefore be more effective?

Rajiv: 24:31

And be way more effective instead of just spray and pray. And so then you created a Gageo. You had a whole great set of tools to enable account based marketing, and then you found that was a better move to go and be enabled yourself to be acquired by demand base.

Jon Miller: 24:46

Yeah, sort of interesting story there. You mentioned earlier like I've created categories. Again, I don't think I've created categories, I think I have found existing categories and exploited opportunity. You know in there, like I didn't create marketing automation.

Rajiv: 25:02

Relico was around before Marketo came along.

Jon Miller: 25:04

Yeah, a good friend is Mark Oregon, one of our fully investors, and in the same way, you know, mobile phones existed before the iPhone came along. Sure, right, but what happened is the iPhone came along and introduced what has become the dominant design, right, and then once that was came in, it was so dominant everybody was like, okay, yeah, phones don't have keyboards. You know, phones are these like rectangles, right, big screens, and that's what that was a dominant design. So I believe in many ways it's more lucrative, easier, better. Lots of you know, you know advantages If you can found, you know, don't create the category, but if you can come in to an existing category and create the dominant design.

Rajiv: 25:49

Right, like, if we look at history on the, you brought up the mobile phone right, there were many mobile phones right there are. Nokia had like 30 of them of all different shapes and sizes, all different. You had keyboards, you had pens. Nobody was really you know. You had the trackball right, nobody was really using the finger as the interface right, and enabling it to be this and have a single operating system that can run across so many different applications right. So there was like there was a, the concept was there, but iPhone made it a singular design, and so your thought was very similar, I think, with some of these.

Jon Miller: 26:24

I didn't necessarily know that that was a great strategy doing Marketo, but I learned that that was a strategy for me. So fast forward to engage you Again. I didn't invent ABM. Itsma coined the term, and then demand base was out there, using ABM as a word, demand base had been helping to create the market and the category around ABM, you know. So I came along and thought with engage you, like all right, I'm going to go tackle that and maybe I can build a better dominant design, you know, for doing this.

Jon Miller: 26:57

Five years into engage you, though, what had happened was pretty interesting, because I had built a really compelling product for kind of, I would say, middle and bottom of the funnel of the ABM process. Demand base had kept innovating and they had built a really amazingly compelling product really for kind of the top of the funnel of ABM, with things like advertising and web personalization and de-anonym you know, traffic, de-anonymization. It started to become clear to me that the dominant design in ABM wasn't going to be what either of us were doing. It was going to be the combination of the two platforms.

Jon Miller: 27:41

Nice and I looked at my roadmap, and it was going to take me three years to get to all the things that I needed If I were doing it organically. I started having conversations with demand base and they were, you know, we had enough open kimono that they were able to share that it was going to take them three years to build what they thought they needed. And so once I realized that this combination was a fast track to what I believe would be the dominant design, it was inevitable that we would find a way to kind of bring these companies together. Even though it was bummer for me and a little hard to no longer be the CEO, I set out to build the next great marketing platform, and this was going to be the path to get there.

Rajiv: 28:23

And sometimes you know it sounds like it's almost like you found the recess right here. You found the chocolate and the peanut butter and you put it together and now you had a dominant design. And I think sometimes the hard part about when you start up these companies you want to be the CEO. You feel that energy about it and then, as part of putting it together, you have to subsube your role and be part of the team again. Right, so you went back to becoming, I think first you were chief product officer, then you became CMO, and so you know you got to continue that journey and build something great for people.

Jon Miller: 28:56

Yeah, I mean. So it's been a little over three years now since we kind of did the merger with Engage O and Demand Base and I think we've done some really amazing things and helped to build the company. I'm proud of it. I'm not, and I'm still here as a consultant, even as I work on the next thing, but it does feel like a job.

Sandeep: 29:29

We're gonna mix it up now with a little game segment called Spark Tank, because you know you guys get it To the show Shark Tank. Okay, anyway, let's dive right in. Jon, at least one thing that I noticed when I was watching your presentations I think it's fairly obvious to notice, because you break into dad jokes every once in a while. It seems like dad jokes are you know. If not, there's certainly a tool in your toolkit, something you're well versed in. So what I wanted to do for this game was I wrote some dad jokes myself. I'm a writer and then I had chat GBT. I had AI write some dad jokes as well, and so the game is you guys are gonna have to determine which ones are written by me, the human, or written by AI, and then, most importantly, we're gonna find out whether or not I'm any. If I'm funnier than chat GBT, all right.

Jon Miller: 30:22

So you have for the challenge. I really hope you are, because every time I've had GBT try to write me a dad joke. It's been really pretty horrible.

Sandeep: 30:29

Yeah, I'll say this. I also punched some of their jokes Because I was like I can't, I can't, it's too much.

Jon Miller: 30:36

You're cheating. So is it is, it's either.

Rajiv: 30:39

Sun.

Jon Miller: 30:40

Deep Rin or Sun Deep Augmented. It's true.

Rajiv: 30:42

It's true. Yeah, by the way, before you go into it, this is. This is a Jon Miller feature. We had him at a wonderful private event and every other slide was a dad joke, so he kept it. He kept it rolling. I love it.

Sandeep: 31:00

It's. I want to get into the strategy of that. I want to. I want to understand your the strategic mindset behind that. But let's, let's get into the game and then we'll. We'll talk about that, all right. My accountant girlfriend finally broke up with me. She said in the end, no matter how hard I tried I was, I just wasn't into it.

Jon Miller: 31:18

That's pretty good and that's human.

Rajiv: 31:21

The intuit part, made it more human, but I, I don't know, I okay.

Sandeep: 31:27

I'll say it's human. Well, I'm into that. Yes, I did write that, thank you. Thank you so much. Pretty good, I'll take pretty good as the the quote there. All right, number two what did Steve Jobs say when he saw Rome for the first time? I came, I saw, I conquered.

Rajiv: 31:45

I mean it's, it's. I think it's pretty good because it uses the eye a lot, but I and it's clever. So because it's clever, I'm also going to say this is a human, suddenly Britain.

Jon Miller: 31:57

Yeah, especially. I mean if it's written. You know I came right, you know, as I, I'm going to assume that was written that way, and if and if so, then yeah, the eyes are low case.

Sandeep: 32:08

Maybe I didn't perform them lower case, but that's okay.

Jon Miller: 32:10

As long as the eyes are lower case, I'm going human.

Rajiv: 32:13

Is there a way to perform lower case?

Sandeep: 32:14

Yeah.

Rajiv: 32:17

I came, I saw I conquered.

Sandeep: 32:19

You are both correct. I did write both of those All right. So, agents, if you're looking out, yeah, I'm, I'm available. Number three what did the Apple watch say to the broken Rolex? Well, I may be smart, but you're timeless.

Jon Miller: 32:37

That's. That's. That's not bad, but again, partly just because some of these are going to have to be GPT and that was not that particularly clever, I'll go GPT.

Sandeep: 32:45

Metagaming, you're metagaming now, all right. Gpt from Jon.

Rajiv: 32:50

I I think it's GPT too I felt that when I you can't always pick the same answers as Jon, are those.

Sandeep: 32:55

You can't pick a winner? Okay Fine, but you guys both get a point here we're doing this cleverly, it's not competitive. Okay.

Rajiv: 33:02

I could be a co-op. You're a cow face.

Sandeep: 33:06

All right, well, you both got it right. Uh, that was in fact now there was a little tweak to it, but yeah, that that was still mostly, mostly GPT.

Jon Miller: 33:15

It was even worse before you tweeted. It was even worse. Yes, okay, cause, cause, cause, it wasn't. It wasn't terrible, which is my general feeling about most of the GPT jokes.

Sandeep: 33:25

Number four yeah, three more. How did the farmer turn into a tech entrepreneur? The only thing they could grow was their Instagram following. Oh see.

Rajiv: 33:36

I think I, yeah, I feel like that one is GPT.

Jon Miller: 33:39

I agree. I don't know. I'm basically going with how funny they are.

Sandeep: 33:43

You guys are sniffing them out, but this is not going to pass the Turing test anytime soon.

Jon Miller: 33:46

I mean not for jokes, definitely not for jokes, not for jokes.

Sandeep: 33:49

That's what I was like. All right, two more, here we go. What do you call a startup that only some people believe exists? A Sasquatch.

Rajiv: 34:01

All right, I like that one, and I'm just going to assume this is Sunday. It's just too clever. Again it may be a laugh For GPT to do Sasquatch.

Jon Miller: 34:11

It made me laugh, so I'm going human.

Sandeep: 34:13

Yeah yeah, human correct, you guys got it. Ding, ding, ding. Five for five so far, all right. Finally, why did the Tesla car blush? Well, it mistook the charging cable for something else. Talk about a shocker.

Jon Miller: 34:27

Okay, I don't think that was that funny, but I don't ever see GPT being risque at all, so I'll actually lean human on that one too.

Rajiv: 34:37

Suddenly created jokes are like they just connect things that normal machine wouldn't connect. So I'm going to disagree with you, jon, on this one, and say this is GPT.

Sandeep: 34:46

Okay, here we go. So now we're going to have a winner. This is perfect. So, jeeve, you say it's GPT, I have a GPT. Jon, you say it was human. Well, guess what? This was the most integrated one. So, in a way, you're both right. But this was a chat, gvt driven one. That I definitely. I added the shocker.

Rajiv: 35:03

Just you had some enhancements I had to All right. So was it GPT 3.5 or 4?

Sandeep: 35:12

Yeah, it was 3.5. I'm going to edge it out just barely to Jon, because you know he's our guest. This is the right thing to do.

Jon Miller: 35:21

It was a collaborative effort the whole way.

Rajiv: 35:22

You're such an Indian I can't believe it. Yeah.

Sandeep: 35:26

Guest or God Guest or God Jon. So, hey, what's your favorite dad joke and maybe give us a little insight on your love of dad jokes and like why you weave them into your presentations and yeah, I don't know if I have a single favorite One I like these days a little bit.

Jon Miller: 35:42

Is my geography teacher asking me to name a country with no R in it? I responded no way.

Rajiv: 35:53

It was take that second.

Sandeep: 35:55

Dad jokes Take a second, take a second.

Jon Miller: 35:58

Here's one that's even harder a little bit. So I have a fear of overly intricate sets of buildings. You could say I have a complex, complex, complex.

Sandeep: 36:11

All three definitions of complex.

Rajiv: 36:14

I have a complex just to get it out.

Jon Miller: 36:16

Anyway, I got a lot more of them. I mean where it came from? To be totally candid is I'm just not that funny and I always like a presentation presenter on stage who can crack some jokes and make the audience laugh and like well, I'm not going to do that, naturally, so I'm just going to do it unnaturally, and then, after doing it and having it work out pretty well, it just sort of became a thing.

Sandeep: 36:39

Well, it totally works. It keeps your attention. You know, it sort of snaps you back into attention sometimes if your mom is starting to drift. Yeah, I think.

Rajiv: 36:48

I think in today's mobile phone interrupt driven world which I do have a rant about a total interrupt driven world it's a good way of capturing people's attention and bring them back.

Jon Miller: 37:01

Yeah, I think bringing it back to people are just one more. That's sort of appropriate as we're doing this one. So the my coworkers. They always laugh at my jokes when we're together, but never over online meetings, it turns out I'm not even remotely funny.

Sandeep: 37:18

I laughed ahead of time because I knew this one was coming. I heard it from your presentation. Okay, remotely.

Rajiv: 37:24

Yeah, strong, strong. I like that. Good end, good end to that one. I like that. Here's my rant. Nowadays, the app makers and the phone folks, all these guys, know that we are so easily, we're so ADD and then, on purpose, whenever we go into their website, their app, they're always hitting us with an interruption.

Jon Miller: 37:44

I think the reality is that's a side effect of the fact that attention so scarce. Everybody feels like, oh, I have a moment of attention, I need to sort of somehow maximize to take advantage of it, but it's at the cost of annoying the consumer. So it may not be the right strategy long term, but there's an awful lot of marketers and folks out there who you know they're driven to, but their metrics drive them to suboptimal near term strategies.

Rajiv: 38:14

Yep, they just drive you up the wall. So that's what it is. So, jon, if you were to think about people who take risk like you do, they just don't. You know, yeah, your parents, your father, went down the attorney path. Your mom was a teacher, your mom's a teacher. It just doesn't happen. I think for most entrepreneurs there's something like, literally, you bumped in and you said you know, I had this dream to be an entrepreneur.

Jon Miller: 38:38

That wasn't me.

Rajiv: 38:39

No.

Jon Miller: 38:40

It really wasn't me. I mean, even when it came down to starting Marketo, you know, I was interviewing at some little startup. I was interviewing at Fair Isaac, which is a neat company. I was like cause? It was like how can I use my data and analytics skills? Well that, fair Isaac does neat data and analytics stuff.

Rajiv: 38:59

Yeah, so yeah. For everyone who doesn't know, Fair Isaac is the algorithm that underpins your FICO scores.

Jon Miller: 39:06

Yeah, and then they actually do have a bunch of other algorithms too, but that's when they're almost the same as well. Oh, was that the?

Sandeep: 39:10

FI and FICO. Yeah, oh, just learned that you learn something every day.

Jon Miller: 39:16

The job I almost took instead of Marketo was to be a forester analyst.

Rajiv: 39:20

Oh and cause I sort of thought it'd be fun. You'd be one of those, one of those folks, you would be on stage.

Jon Miller: 39:28

I like the writing and the presenting and all that kind of stuff. So that's why I thought that might have been a decent job. I don't like the fact it would get me to travel out to Boston a couple of times a year out of Boston. But then there was Marketo and I was like so I was evaluating these different opportunities, which one's the best job? And obviously Marketo had more risk behind it. But because I was doing it with Phil and he was putting some money in, he was the CEO, he was more experienced executives it really felt like it made the risk pretty tolerable. And then I discovered I loved it. So you learn by doing yeah. And then, once I discovered I loved it, then, a I wanted to repeat it and B I had the resources to be able to manage the risk.

Rajiv: 40:15

Yeah, and I think after Marketo, people were coming to you. I mean, a lot of times people feel like if you nailed the first time, especially in business to business, they feel like you could do it again. Because, as another one of our podcasters told us in our podcast, guests told us, in business to consumer it's kind of a hit-driven thing. You get it and you may not get it again, but in business to business, once you start off down a path, your customers will help you. If you gain resonance with your customers, they will help you right. So they probably saw that, hey, you did it, you did it, you nailed it, let's do it again.

Jon Miller: 40:51

Yeah, that's the hope and that's interesting. I heard that sort of about the sort of business to business versus business to consumer.

Rajiv: 40:58

Yeah, it's a thing. I've talked about this with VCs. You may have a home run with some product and you just caught a wave and it may be you or it may be not you, and it's hard to do again.

Sandeep: 41:10

Well, one of the elements of the three pillars you talked about was timing. That was the first one you mentioned. I feel like that's the one that's maybe most out of your hands in some respects, right.

Jon Miller: 41:19

You get to pick the business idea yeah.

Sandeep: 41:22

So it's about how you then sort of evaluate the timing. I guess is the part where you actually have some agency right.

Jon Miller: 41:30

Right, but a lot of entrepreneurs do get so enamored with their idea or, even worse, with their technology or their solution that they sort of ignore like is the timing right?

Rajiv: 41:39

Right, and I think this is where you have to be very open to listening to feedback from what you believe is the right customer and of course, you have to pick the right customer and the right segment and all that. But you really have to be open to it because if they really like you and like where you're going, they'll tell you and it's a smaller world of people who are very similar that will help connect you, which is different than consumer behavior.

Jon Miller: 42:03

Yeah, You're telling about masses. It's tough, though, because you go do these customer interviews and people wanted to tell you a good job and they want to tell you they like your thing Right, and it's a real scale to get good at asking people the questions in a way that will actually have them tell you that they think your baby's ugly.

Rajiv: 42:23

That's right. That is the hardest part, and it's really about who. Are they leading edge? Are they trailing edge? Are they in sync with you or not? There's a lot that goes into that right, which makes it even more difficult or more challenging. So, jon, based on that, what's one piece of advice you'd give to someone starting their career in B2B marketing?

Jon Miller: 42:44

Yeah, I mean, the one piece of advice I would sort of always try to give people like if you could literally get somebody to sort of take this is to just try to embrace continuous learning and adaptation, whether it's marketing or anything else, I mean, these are constantly changing, evolving things like industries. So if you're able to have that kind of learning mindset, see how industry is changing, what technologies are changing, kind of just that curiosity, I think that pays off really, really well. You have to be able to tie that curiosity though with the ability to actually kind of execute and get some stuff done.

Rajiv: 43:30

What would you say is your favorite technological innovation or invention? What was the thing that made it feel like magic to you, that sparked it to life, to get you to build technology for people?

Jon Miller: 43:43

Yeah, I mean certainly I also have my favorite technology. As I said, my path to sort of being an entrepreneur is slightly different, but the one that I always point to is just seems like magic is Google Maps.

Jon Miller: 43:56

I remember working at Epiphany in 2000,. Living in San Francisco, driving to San Mateo and like what route I'm going to drive home each day was always like before I would leave. I'm like trying to look at traffic reports and which way do I take? 101 or 280? And the ability to just punch in where you want to go and have a traffic optimized route that we can just always have access to, to me is really, really amazing. And then over the years they've added all these other things, like I use it to plan bike rides so I know how much elevation is ahead of me. I love the best coffee shop on the way, love search along my route.

Sandeep: 44:40

There's like an omniscience to it. Right, You're like, wow, you get this sort of cosmic point of view on the world that you otherwise couldn't get.

Jon Miller: 44:48

This question may be also, if I can take us, to slightly in a different direction for a half second, go for it.

Rajiv: 44:54

Please Bring us a spark for the ages.

Jon Miller: 44:57

So everybody's talking about AI right now, and you've got to have AI in your next solution. I feel like what everybody's doing. Mostly, though, is how do I use AI to solve existing problems better? Like SGRs send emails. How can my AI make better emails for my SGRs? That to me feels like internet 1.0, where it was popsiclescom I'm going to sell popsicles, but now I can sell them online.

Jon Miller: 45:29

Where the real excitement from the internet came was internet 2 and perhaps 3.

Jon Miller: 45:34

But really when it was businesses like Facebook or Uber or YouTube that couldn't have existed without the internet, but arecom straight up taking an existing business, and the question is what is going to be AI 2.0? That's something I'm thinking about. I doubt I'm smart enough to be the one who really figures that out for a major business idea, but when you asked about a technology that's truly seemed to magic, one that always comes to mind is silly, silly, little small thing, but my kids go to sleepaway camp, and in the past, every day they would load up photos from camp and my wife would spend an hour playing. Where's Waldo? Looking through every photo for some sign of life of your kid, that your kid might be happy and smiling or standing next to a friend while I camp. And then last year they introduced AI facial recognition to this thing, where you can load up a picture of your kid and now you just get a notification every time there's a photo of your kid loaded. This is not like a revolutionary business idea.

Rajiv: 46:49

You could pull out. You have the location, you can match it against other data of places that look like that, so you can basically figure it out. The system should be able to figure it out.

Jon Miller: 47:00

You load your kid's photo, so it just says here's photos of your kid Right and write it, write it.

Rajiv: 47:05

Write the description.

Jon Miller: 47:07

So it feels like magic, because it just takes a problem and it just makes it work seamlessly. There's gotta be ideas that AI unlocks. That, I think, truly will just be sort of that next level. I don't know what it is. I'm excited for that, though.

Rajiv: 47:26

Well, Sunday has a question he's dying to ask.

Sandeep: 47:28

All right. So I'm curious about your take on. So the marketing world is moving to this cookie-less world and I know my brother was earlier on the pre-show, was talking about how well we can hack around that potentially. But I'm curious, like we're moving this cookie-less world and we're driving, is it possible to drive better signals from interactive content and direct customer engagement with that content? Like I create interactive shows, it's part, it's one thing I do. So that's our thesis. So I'm curious what your take is on that.

Jon Miller: 47:58

Well, I mean, to me that's a flavor of just first-party data. It gets almost into zero-party data depending on how you set up your interactive content. Generally, that's the trend everybody's sort of moving towards for the cookie-less world is how do I take better advantage of that zero and first-party data? We absolutely see that in B2B and ABM. They just the rise of the importance of taking advantage of the data, using it properly, using it effectively. So I guess, to sort of your question specifically yeah, interactive content, direct customer engagement, is kind of frankly always going to be better than cookie-based third-party information. Marketers just have to sort of get good at using it.

Rajiv: 48:42

That's right. I think we have to derive it how we. We have to be better at. You're supposed to use third-party cookie information to do a better job with first-party information so that when that person comes, you're preparing it with something better. But I agree, I think that's the game. It's all about being much more interactive and being very personal to what you want. It's almost good advertising, good content, get to people, get people to where they want to go. Okay cool. So one of the things, jon, I know you love is you love cocktails.

Jon Miller: 49:11

I do love cocktails.

Rajiv: 49:13

And I had the wonderful pleasure of being with Jon at this amazing place in Austin, this underground bar where it not only mixed the history of cocktails, but it's but also amazing cocktails. So what cocktail would you say if you would have list three of them, or even one of them that you love, and the history behind it? What would it be?

Jon Miller: 49:37

Yeah, I've been drinking a lot of the classics this year or recently or kind of slightly modified classics. Probably my biggest go-to is just the Manhattan. It's easy to make and it's classic for a reason. But I'm having a lot of fun with. You can really change the whole profile of the Manhattan by ordering a quart, by adding a quarter ounce of something. A quarter ounce of creme de cacao makes it into like an interesting dessert drink, especially if you use like walnut bitters instead of Angostura bitters. I'm also a big fan of Amaro's, which are kind of Italian liqueurs stands for bitter. There's literally dozens, if not hundreds of ones you can kind of get. They're all really interesting profiles. Quarter ounce of Amaro to your Manhattan kind of a whole new drink.

Sandeep: 50:33

Once again, you find the category and then you create the dominant version of it with some special sauce, mixing the two things together. Love it.

Rajiv: 50:42

One of my I'd say one of my favorite things, when I sometimes I just love the way it's presented, like there was that one cocktail that we had where it had milk in it, but it was clear.

Jon Miller: 50:54

Oh, a milk punch what I was like.

Rajiv: 50:57

I couldn't get it. I was like how, and it didn't taste like gas, sounds like gas.

Sandeep: 51:01

it was like gas.

Jon Miller: 51:01

It was delicious, something or other, no, oh, this is over the top, so what?

Sandeep: 51:04

happens is when you mix milk with alcohol.

Jon Miller: 51:10

The alcohol causes all the milk particles to or sorry, the solids in the milk to curdle and then, if you filter that through like a fine cheesecloth or something, the curdles stay behind and what you end up on the other side is a clear drink that has some of the creamy mouthfeel and texture that you would get from the milk. It doesn't taste milky per se, but you get. It definitely has a really interesting mouthfeel and it's a cool way to make very innovative drinks that are, in some cases, perfectly clear.

Sandeep: 51:48

See. So, from physics to chemistry, here we go. We're going full, full, full, full, full, full, full, full, full, full, full, full full full.

Rajiv: 51:54

this is so much fun. All right. So, Jon, now let's pretend I know you're looking at your next thing, but let's pretend that money is no object and you could just do whatever you want. It could be TV show, book, podcast, it could be maybe mixing drinks, making drinks, it could be anything you want. Money is no object and you can do whatever you want, Like what pops to mind.

Jon Miller: 52:18

This is the wacky thing I said at the beginning of the call. My wife has her own direct-to-consumer shoe business and she always tells me all the time what I really need is a marketer. There you go, she's the merchant. She knows how to design the shoes and get the shoes and sell that, but she's kind of figuring out the marketing on her own.

Rajiv: 52:38

Wow, so you become the DTC guy. You go from B2B marketer to direct-to-consumer expert.

Jon Miller: 52:45

For the next few months at least, I'm probably gonna be spending at least some of my time helping to run marketing for a direct-to-consumer shoe brand called Bells and Becks Love it. Who knows, maybe, if that actually really helps her business take off, maybe that's what I end up doing. You never know.

Rajiv: 53:03

Make it bigger than all birds Bigger, bigger and better. You can do it Awesome, awesome. Well, jon, thank you so much for coming in today and spending time with us and sharing with us All these amazing insights and experiences that you've had in just growing up, being part of the industry, enabling new companies to grow and then talking about your next ambitions. I just love having you here, so thank you so much.

Jon Miller: 53:27

Great conversation. Thank you.

Rajiv: 53:36

Hey, that was an amazing interview. I really enjoyed talking with Jon. He's just so full of interesting insight and I love the fact that he always wants to figure out how things work, and that's what got him into physics. He's well planned but at the same time, he has this notion of letting things flow.

Sandeep: 53:55

His great advice was like adaptability, right, like, and being able to yeah, go with the flow. And yet he comes from this wholly holistically. You know hard sciences analyze, experiment, test, repeat, gather data for perspective and it is really cool how he sort of marries those two aspects of himself.

Rajiv: 54:16

All right. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the pod, please take a moment to rate it and comment. You can find us on Apple, spotify and everywhere podcasts can be found.

Sandeep: 54:25

That's right, and the show is produced by myself Saini Parikh and Anand Shah. Production assistance by Taryn Talley. Edited by Sean Mayer.

Rajiv: 54:32

I'm your host Rajiv Parikh from Position Squared, a leading growth marketing company based in Silicon Valley. Come visit us at position2.com.

Sandeep: 54:41

This has been an effing funny production.

Rajiv: 54:43

We'll catch you next time. Remember, folks, be ever curious.