Before Adrian Ebscins learned to build a marketing pipeline, he learned to work with proteins. At McGill University, he studied biochemistry and biotechnology, worked across academic and industrial labs, co-edited the undergraduate science research journal and earned a place on the dean's multidisciplinary research list. His first professional language was the language of mechanisms: inputs, interactions, evidence and results.
The obvious story would make the laboratory a prelude that he eventually escaped. His career makes more sense if the lab never really left. Ebscins kept choosing businesses whose products are difficult to see at a glance - a university's online community, an industrial wastewater system, a high-temperature 3D printer, the machinery of academic operations, the moving parts of a small business's cash. Each job asked for the same act of translation: understand the system well enough to make it useful to someone else.
That habit now arrives at Relay, the Toronto financial-technology company where public profiles list him as chief marketing officer. It is a new industry on his résumé, but not an unfamiliar problem. Business banking is full of invisible operations: approvals, transfers, reserves, receipts, bills and permissions. The product may live on a screen. The value lives in whether an owner feels in control on a Tuesday afternoon.
The microphone beside the microscope
After McGill, Ebscins pursued graduate biochemistry at the University of Ottawa. He received a C$17,500 scholarship from Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council in 2010. Around the same time, he built another kind of experiment. Peer Review Radio was a science show and podcast on CHUO 89.1 FM. He founded it, assembled more than a dozen volunteers and led a 32-episode season.
The show ranged across palaeontology, online science communication and public policy. Guests later remembered an interviewer who brought them into conversations with other researchers and communicators. The work was not a retreat from science. It was a test of what happened when scientific knowledge left a paper and entered a room, a radio schedule and an audience's day.
The microphone revealed a different research question. Ebscins became interested in social-media analytics, influence and what he called the attention economy. He left the master's program for the university's Communications Directorate in 2011, becoming an online community specialist. The move exchanged molecules for messages, but it preserved the investigator's stance: observe behavior, test a channel, measure the response.
At Ottawa, accessibility had a distinctly Canadian complication. The institution communicated in French and English, and its social accounts had to do more than publish duplicate notices. Ebscins described an effort to bring both languages into shared accounts, increasing the chance that francophone and anglophone students would encounter one another. The audience was not a demographic abstraction. It was a community with different doors into the same institution.
A futurist who kept score
Ebscins began speaking publicly about attention economics, gamification, multilingual e-government, analytics and digital communications. By 2015, a conference preview credited him with appearances at more than 30 events. In Perugia that year, he ran a workshop on the future of higher education in a digital era. His slides moved through open educational resources, learning analytics, automation, changing work and new institutional models.
The presentation did not pretend prediction was clairvoyance. It offered a process: frame the present, scan trends, describe possible futures, decide which one is desirable, then plan. The last slide reduced the whole deck to a question: “Which future will you shape?” It is an operator's version of futurism. A forecast matters when it changes a decision.
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His next moves tested that framework in increasingly commercial settings. At Saltworks Technologies, first as a marketing manager and publicly later as director of marketing, he worked close to technical teams selling industrial water-treatment systems. One article under his name explained how desalting produced water could reduce polymer use in enhanced oil recovery. The subject was dense; the business case was concrete: less freshwater, lower chemical cost, measurable operating savings.
At AON3D, he spent about a year as director of marketing for an industrial 3D-printing company. Hardware placed another demanding product between engineering reality and buyer understanding. The pattern was becoming visible. Ebscins was not collecting unrelated sectors. He was repeatedly entering places where technical fluency could become commercial leverage.
There is a practical humility in that kind of marketing. The marketer cannot invent what the machine does, and a technical buyer will notice quickly if the explanation outruns the engineering. Credibility comes from working beside specialists, locating the outcome that matters and showing the chain between the two. Ebscins' published water-treatment work did exactly that: process detail led to chemical savings, water recovery and an investment case. It treated the reader as capable of understanding the mechanism while still respecting the reader's need to make a business decision.
Building the room, not only the funnel
The career then bent back toward education. Ebscins served as director of marketing at Ready Education from June 2020 to October 2021. Aggregated public career data credits that period with a 441 percent increase in marketing-attributed pipeline value and a 24 percent improvement in average monthly lead generation. It also records changes to the way the small team worked: agile project management, better estimation and faster onboarding for new tasks.
Those numbers are useful because they expose his preferred unit of work. A campaign is temporary. An operating system persists. Improving how work enters a team, how estimates get made and how channels connect can compound after a single advertisement has disappeared.
Coursedog offered a larger version of that assignment. Ebscins joined in 2021 to lead demand generation and later moved through vice-president roles into senior marketing leadership. Coursedog sells software for academic operations - the curricular, scheduling, catalog and workflow infrastructure behind a student's path through an institution. It is important work with a visibility problem. Few students know the machinery exists until a requirement, a timetable or a graduation plan breaks.
The marketing answer was bigger than a stream of leads. During his farewell, Ebscins wrote that the company helped define academic operations as a category across a platform, conference, community and magazine. That list is revealing. Software supplied the tool. Events created ritual. Community made peers visible to one another. Editorial work gave the field a continuing language.
He reported that Coursedog moved from 50 customers to more than 300 during his four and a half years, while annual opportunity generation and pipeline grew fourfold. The marketing team grew from two people to seven. The company also moved from its Series A period through a private-equity investment. Those are company outcomes, not one person's trophies, and his farewell thanked the leaders, marketers and higher-education professionals who made the work possible.
Then came the dog joke. Ebscins claimed a 1,000 percent increase in canine content, complete with a run of puns. It was a small demonstration of the balance his public work keeps returning to: evidence can be exact without the voice becoming sterile. A blue-dog brand had permission to behave like one.
The next complicated system
Relay presents a different category and a familiar human tension. Small-business finance is numerical, but owners experience it emotionally as timing and control. Money arrives, bills wait, payroll approaches, receipts go missing and a reserve either grows or does not. The institution sees accounts. The operator sees tomorrow.
Ebscins enters as a marketer who has moved between public institutions and venture-backed companies, between physical machinery and cloud software, and between science communication and demand generation. His earlier work suggests that he will look for the system behind the message. Which workflows make a business owner feel clear? Which product details become a shared vocabulary? Which channels make the next useful action easier?
There is also a neat loop in the move. More than a decade ago, he was studying how attention flows through online communities. Modern financial software competes for exactly that scarce resource. Every confusing screen, unexplained transaction or manual step charges the user a little attention. A product that returns clarity returns time as well.
A scientist is trained to resist a lovely conclusion unsupported by results. A broadcaster learns that results alone do not hold an audience. Ebscins' career sits in the productive argument between those two disciplines. The numbers need a story. The story has to survive the numbers.
That is the useful part of his route to Relay. Reinvention did not require erasing the previous identity. The lab trained the researcher. Radio trained the host. A bilingual university trained the community manager. Industrial technology trained the translator. Education software trained the category builder. The CMO gets to use all of them.