Asaph Schulman reached marketing by escaping a perfectly respectable career. He was a software engineer by trade, and the part that finally did him in was not writing code so much as fixing other people’s bugs. He saw the early promise of online marketing, when search optimization still felt like an unlocked side door, and changed direction. The engineer did not disappear. He merely moved from the product to the conversation around it.
That distinction explains his career better than a title ever could. Schulman has been a sales engineer, a technical consultant, a founder in Australia, a regional general manager for eToro, a marketing chief, a crypto-company CEO and, since 2019, chief marketing officer at Firebolt. Across those jobs, the recurring challenge has been translating difficult technology for people who already know enough to distrust translation.
Firebolt sells an analytical database to engineers building data-heavy products. Its buyers are not waiting to be dazzled by a cloud drawn in a pleasant shade of blue. They have queries running too slowly, infrastructure bills climbing too quickly and colleagues asking why the dashboard is still thinking. Schulman understood the mood because he had occupied the same technical world. His audience, as he once put it, has “very low tolerance for fluff.” He sounded pleased by this. It keeps a marketer honest.
The bright side of the technical divide
Schulman studied at Tel Aviv University from 1997 to 2001 and graduated cum laude. His early work joined technical knowledge to commercial conversation: sales engineering at CTI2, followed by technical consulting at ClickSoftware. Then came entrepreneurial stretches in Australia, where he co-founded A-NET Solutions and Defence Solutions Australia, before running eToro’s Australia and New Zealand business.
By 2011 he was leading marketing at the application-security company Checkmarx. The numbers attached to that chapter are unusually legible. Published accounts say the company’s revenue moved from below $1 million to more than $85 million during his tenure, while the marketing team grew twentyfold. The growth was not the product of a single glittering campaign. It involved the less photogenic work of lead generation, positioning, events, content and building an operation that could hand useful opportunities to sales.
Checkmarx also gave him a useful failure. The content team initially published one or two posts a day. The cadence generated traffic, but the work was shallow. They changed the rhythm to one substantial article a week, written to answer questions readers genuinely had. Those pieces began attracting tens of thousands of reads. A content machine, Schulman learned, is allowed to slow down if its readers stop scrolling past it.
He later spent two years as chief executive of Coinmama, then returned to the marketing seat at Firebolt. The route matters. He did not arrive as a career copywriter borrowing technical diction. He had written code, managed businesses and sat in the chief executive’s chair. He could see the buyers, the sales team and the board from their own sides of the table.
A career in four acts
A database company discovers mischief
Early at Firebolt, the founding team sat down to decide what sort of character the company would have in public. The answer joined traits that enterprise technology often treats as incompatible: extremely technical, but casual; serious about the machinery, but unwilling to be solemn about itself. Schulman believed the marketing should be informed by the people inside the company. Consistency, repeated long enough, would make that character recognizable.
The result included a mock movie trailer, a product demo advertised as lasting 0.86 seconds and an 8-bit game in which a data engineer goes on a quest to “get the data.” The game amused a visitor for perhaps two minutes before, in Schulman’s cheerful description, they returned to their dull everyday tasks. It was a joke pitched at people who had seen too many earnest white papers promising to revolutionize the same Tuesday afternoon.
Play was not permission to become vague. Schulman’s technical audience had enough context to challenge every claim. The campaigns worked because the levity sat on top of product knowledge, not in place of it. One of Firebolt’s actors was a solution architect. The team asked him to pose for half an hour, then used inexpensive freelance help for editing. Deep pockets, Schulman argued, do not confer creativity. A smaller company can use the people and knowledge already in the room.
“Our target audience is a very sophisticated, very technical audience. They have very low tolerance for fluff.”Asaph Schulman
That principle extended to search. Firebolt was competing with cloud companies willing to pay hundreds of dollars per click, sometimes while bidding against Google on Google’s own advertising system. Schulman’s team mapped error messages from products it hoped to replace, then created helpful pages around those specific searches. A frustrated engineer could arrive through a narrow, high-intent query. It was marketing conducted with a debugger’s eye: find the precise failure state, then meet the person standing in it.
The joke has a revenue target
A playful brand can be mistaken for a relaxed operation. Schulman’s version has a hard numerical spine. At Firebolt, he argued for marketing and sales to agree on their definitions and objectives, then rally around qualified meetings. A lead was not valuable simply because a form had been completed. A prospect had to fit the detailed customer profile, attend a meeting and be accepted by sales as a genuine fit.
This approach removes a favorite corporate pastime: two departments producing separate explanations for the same missed number. Schulman even made the case that business-development representatives can sit within marketing when the handoff to sales is a qualified meeting. The organization can change as the company grows, but the handshake must remain explicit.
He is equally unsentimental about planning. Annual plans are necessary; reality declines to read them. Territories change, people are hired and markets wander. His instruction is compact: try things, check them, double down when they work and kill them when they do not. A marketer who once fixed bugs still thinks in iterations.
Brand measurement receives the same clear-eyed treatment. Creative campaigns produce searches, comments and conversations in private Slack or WhatsApp groups that attribution software will never fully reconstruct. A colleague mentions a video; someone visits later; the dashboard shrugs. Schulman values qualitative feedback and movement in brand search while accepting the blind spots. “You just need to accept the fact that you don’t know everything,” he has said. This is an uncommon sentence in a profession fond of claiming a complete view.
Taste, taught every morning
The harder problem was transmitting Firebolt’s voice as the company expanded. A brand can be codified into adjectives, but adjectives do not tell a new employee whether a particular joke is funny, or merely loud. During remote work, Schulman’s marketing team developed a daily conversation lasting fifteen to thirty minutes. They talked about campaigns, posts, competitors and the trashiest television they had watched. The habit continued.
Those conversations were a living editorial test: does this feel like us? Taste became less mysterious because the team practiced it together. Schulman’s former colleagues have described a manager who could be demanding and sensitive, open-minded and sharp, someone who listened to different opinions and made people flourish. That portrait helps explain why alignment appears so often in his thinking. A distinctive brand cannot survive as one executive’s private performance. Other people need room to recognize it, question it and make it.
His hiring preference follows the same logic. Experience matters, but he looks for leaders willing to get their hands dirty. A person who previously managed a function may need to become an individual contributor again, work with agencies and build the first version before earning a larger team. The title arrives on day one. The department does not.
There is a civic footnote to the operator’s career. In 2019, Schulman co-founded ClearGiving, a peer-to-peer charity platform built around transparency and the aim that all donated funds reach recipient families. It sits beside a professional life spent clarifying handoffs: between marketing and sales, company and buyer, donor and recipient. The contexts differ, but the preference for visible accountability does not.
Keeping the technical audience in the room
Firebolt’s leadership changed in 2025, when Hemanth Vedagarbha became chief executive and co-founder Eldad Farkash moved to chairman. Schulman publicly welcomed the appointment after working closely with Vedagarbha on go-to-market leadership. He also continued promoting product moves including a Confluent streaming integration and Firebolt Core, the free self-managed version of the company’s analytical engine.
The company around him has changed since its first website offered little more than a sentence - the data world was about to change - and a box for an email address. The central marketing wager has held. Technical audiences do not require technical companies to behave like institutions carved in granite. They will entertain a game, a trailer or a cheeky comparison. They simply insist that the people making the joke understand the query plan.
Schulman’s career is the proof hiding inside the method. He left engineering, but he kept its habits: locate the real problem, observe what happens, discard what fails and respect the person using the system. Marketing supplied a larger canvas and, apparently, fewer inherited bugs. It also let him make the database business briefly funny, which is a modest miracle and a very practical competitive advantage.