Eloqua, Inc.

Being 20 years in the military as a weapons system instructor, what is the weapons system instructor carry into a revenue organization? And what did you find when you stepped into assembly, for example? And what did that actually look like?

So before long ago, I helped start a company called Eloqua, and Eloqua was grown and was acquired by Oracle, same with a company called Bloomreach, and now Assembly.

I spent the last 20 years not only in the tech space, but a portion of my life in that fighter weapons systems sort of world.

As the weapons systems instructor, our function and purpose Tanner, is to train what we call situational awareness, right? So helping the warfighter to understand the fight, where they are in the fight, you know, for lack of a better term, I'm going to speak with my hands for a moment, how far away the jet is from the nearest gas.

They're going out and buying NetSuite.

They're going out and buying Eloqua, right? They're buying their way into all of these adjacent markets.

And in contrast, and this is what's been striking mostly if we fast forward to state of play now, is that for the AI development and the build-out has all been done off balance sheet.

and supported by capital markets, obviously.

I feel like we're all... it's not that we're over AI, but I'm overwhelmed, bored with just another post on AI.

I feel like, I think the parallels between, or the comparisons between, perhaps, This wave of transformation and the transformation that happened about 2007 when all the marketing automation came in, demand generation wave with Eloqua and Marketo, that was a really big shift.

And I think that it's interesting to see how perhaps the... um the the gen x's or the late or the early millennials who lived through that seem to be coping better with transformation that's happening now and pilots because they're later in their careers and they've just seen more water under the bridge but also they've seen this particular type of water go under the bridge and they know they have to reinvent themselves for a new era and they're pretty busy doing that whereas perhaps you've got younger generations and i'm not being I'm not suggesting that one kind of cohort is better than another.

That's a ridiculous thing to say.

She was like, you know, it's still a currency which has some value and marketing has to navigate around it.

I think most marketers probably think would get rid of if they could, but there are still a lot of people who still rely on them.

I don't quite understand some of the reticence, but there's, I mean, one of the interesting, on a technological level, right, Marketo, Eloqua was a brilliant product and brilliant brand that was killed by Oracle, right? Absolutely.

Much lamented as a brand.