Only one in every 1,000 venture-backed enterprise software companies reaches $100M ARR. Even fewer get there with the same marketing leader in the seat from seed to centaur. I’ve been lucky—with a healthy dose of stubborn optimism—to be one of them.

This isn’t a story about brilliant overnight success. It’s about the long game: showing up every day, evolving with the company, and learning how to build a marketing org that can scale without collapsing under its own growth. Because in cybersecurity, a lot has to go right—and a lot is just staying consistent through the chaos.

In this candid and prescriptive session, I’ll share the GTM lessons forged over six years as CMO of Semperis—from scrappy startup to nine-figure ARR. You’ll walk away with stage-specific insights on:

- What actually changes at $2M, $20M, and $100M ARR
- The early GTM bets that worked (and the ones that didn’t)
- How to scale a marketing org without losing your mind (or your job)
- Why brand, demand, and product marketing must evolve in sync
- How to stay aligned with sales and the CEO across every phase
- The shift from marketing leader to Chief Market Officer—and what that really means

Whether you’re a founder hiring your first marketer or a CMO trying to grow without burning out, this session is for anyone scaling go-to-market with clarity, staying power, and just enough duct tape to keep things moving.

As cybersecurity marketers we’ve all been there: minimal budget, big expectations, stuck wearing too many hats, but somehow always getting the job done. Join the Strategic Marketing and Comms team from Cisco Talos as they break down their go to strategy for home grown content to ways they scale to create award winning content.

This panel with Hazel Burton, Madison Burns, and Mitch Neff will tap into over 40 combined years of cybersecurity marketing knowledge to share what Talos has found to be successful in getting threat and security research seen and engaged with by millions. The trio will walk attendees through a typical content pipeline, sharing how the “sausage is made” while providing actionable steps attendees can take back with them to improve their content marketing strategy. Key topics that will be discussed are the importance of “repackaging” content to fit different audience and channel needs, finding your brand voice or POV in a sea of competitors, failing fast, and delivering on “less is more”.

- Immediate steps to implement into your content and promotion strategy
- How to find the most helpful/digestible content for an audience that demands clarity.
- Real life examples of grass roots efforts that you can replicate within your teams and organizations
- Scalable case study of a high value production and it’s payoffs
- Opportunity for live Q&A

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Marketers often view working with industry analysts as a necessary evil and an opportunity to tell them everything about what makes their product or service great. Many marketers only interact with analysts during evaluations, then forget about them until the next one. Getting the most out of industry analysts, however, requires ongoing engagement and listening as much as (or preferably, more than) you speak. Hear from Recovering Marketer and Forrester VP and Research Director Joseph Blankenship (JB) who was a cybersecurity marketer for 10 years before joining Forrester as a Senior Analyst, Omdia security industry analyst Melida Marks, and moderator and public relations and analyst relations expert Carmen Harris. The panel will talk about what successful marketers and companies are doing as they interact with analysts.

When a small startup spotted a blind spot in identity security - millions of non-human identities (NHIs) running unchecked - we turned that gap into a market. This talk shares the inside playbook run by a 2-person marketing team building a category and shaping it to their favor: working with analysts to identify and coin the term NHI, initiating and publishing research-led assets people actually bookmark and competitors refer to (OWASP NHI Top 10, CSA State of NHI report), and running relentless education loops that convert curiosity into budget lines.

I'll discuss the bumps, wins, and gritty ongoing work of staying the category frontrunner even as new vendors pile in. If you own product marketing, positioning, or content, you'll leave with a tested framework for creating a new category and obtaining thought-leadership, or at least feel inspired that it can actually be done.

- Craft "door-opener" content (data-backed, research-led) that cuts through the noise and makes an unknown problem into a new cybersecurity market.
- Come up and execute flagship projects (reports, frameworks, workshops) to make the problem a priority and create budget sections.
- Lock in leadership signals (benchmarks, community hubs, speaker slots) so competitors reinforce your narrative, not theirs.
- Identify unique customer use-cases and tying them to business outcomes.