Domenic Colasante knows what a bridge is worth

Domenic Colasante was told to clean out his locker. He was a sophomore at Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia, and the tuition bill had become a bill his family could no longer pay. His mother normally worked two jobs. Between jobs, the arithmetic stopped working. He took his problem to the rector’s office, expecting to say goodbye.

Years later, he would build a business around an awkward piece of arithmetic: companies wanted more from marketing while spending less to get it. But the school story came first. Long before he was arranging teams across continents, someone had to find a way to keep a promising student in his classroom.

Help at Roman Catholic allowed him to stay. As an adult, he returned to the problem from the other side, giving $525,000 to Roman Catholic through BLOCS in February 2024. A successful business had given him a tax bill; Pennsylvania’s education tax credit arrangements gave him a way to direct money toward students. There is a pleasing practicality to that sequence. Gratitude, in this instance, came with a mechanism.

A bridge, with a student on it

At Widener University, money threatened to interrupt his education again. During his second year, a change in family finances left him trying to cover half his tuition. He was working as a restaurant waiter and considered taking a year away from college. Instead, he approached a faculty member, who connected him with enrollment administrator Tom Malloy.

Malloy found emergency funding. Colasante stayed, finished his degree in three years, and graduated in 2010. “I was looking for a bridge,” he later recalled. It is an unusually useful metaphor for a donation: something that gets a person from one solid patch of ground to the next.

His wife, Xena, was a fellow Widener business student. The university became part of his working life again when he joined its board of trustees in 2019. He subsequently established the Colasante Emergency Fund for students whose finances threatened to push them out. A temporary shortage of money did not have to become a permanent change of direction.

The marketer who kept looking at the machinery

His professional education ran through enterprise technology. There were marketing roles at SAP and Siemens, and work on strategic accounts at Unify. At WGroup, a technology management consulting firm, he worked in sales and marketing operations before becoming chief marketing officer. Along the way, he earned an MBA at Villanova, concentrating on strategic management and international business.

These are businesses where a sale may involve several decision makers, a long buying process, and a considerable amount of explanation. A clever advertisement can open a door. Somebody still has to know which door, who is behind it, and what happens after it opens.

At WGroup, Colasante put revenue at the center of the job. In his account of that period, the firm grew about 30 percent annually and marketing contributed 56 percent of sales bookings. He had learned to judge marketing by its connection to business, rather than by how busy the department looked.

One smaller experiment makes the point. WGroup used an employee advocacy program to help consultants share their expertise through social media. Over three and a half years, the program generated more than $2 million in sales pipeline, tracked through tagged links. The valuable material was already inside the firm. The operational challenge was getting it out without turning every consultant into a full-time publisher.

Someone in Kuala Lumpur was already doing it

Colasante’s next move began with a professional frustration and an introduction. Through a chain of acquaintances, he encountered marketing talent in Kuala Lumpur. The people he met were doing sophisticated testing and building dynamic web experiences, work that people in his own circles were discussing with enthusiasm. Here was a team actually making the pieces run together.

In 2017, he co-founded 2X. The initial proposition was straightforward enough to explain without a diagram: give business marketers a dedicated external team to execute the work. A company’s own leaders could concentrate on direction while specialists handled campaigns, creative production, technology, and analysis.

The business put its delivery operation in Malaysia and its headquarters outside Philadelphia. That geography was central to the economics. But the quality of the work mattered to the proposition as much as the location. A cheaper campaign that fails remains an expensive way to discover disappointment.

The name for the arrangement was marketing as a service. It borrowed the managed-service idea familiar in other business functions and applied it to the recurring work of a marketing department. The customer was buying a continuing ability to get things done.

The day after the software goes live

Ask Colasante about marketing technology and he tends to follow the purchase with a less glamorous question: who will operate it? Implementation attracts a budget and a deadline. Daily use has a way of becoming everybody’s responsibility, which is an elegant route to becoming nobody’s.

He has described a client repeatedly losing the people who operated its Marketo system. The consequences were wonderfully concrete and thoroughly inconvenient: emails did not go out, automation stopped, and leads did not get routed. The platform existed. The organization’s ability to use it kept walking out the door.

A service provider, in his argument, accepts responsibility for continuity when staff change. Recruiting, training, and replacing people become part of delivering the service. That changes what the client’s marketing leader spends the day worrying about. It also puts an obligation on the provider that a software licence alone cannot carry.

His criticism reaches beyond staffing. Marketing departments have spent years changing platforms, advertising channels, and the metrics in their presentations. The organization doing the work deserves the same attention. An org chart may be less entertaining than a product demonstration. It can also determine whether the demonstration ever turns into useful work.

The org chart acquires some investors

Recognize became 2X’s first institutional investor in March 2023. The investment was intended to expand capabilities and accelerate a business that had begun with founder funding. By then, the case for a different way to organize marketing had become a company with the scale to attract a technology services investor.

In 2024, Colasante received an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year award for Greater Philadelphia. The regional distinction recognized the business he and his colleagues had built; it also placed an operator of marketing services among founders from a much wider range of industries.

That June, a RemoteTech Breakthrough CEO of the Year award highlighted another part of the operating story. 2X had added 200 employees in 2021 and another 250 in the first half of 2022. Managing distributed work was already a substantial responsibility, with real people and client commitments behind the headcount.

A strategic secondary investment from Insight Partners followed in 2025. Insight had encountered 2X through its work with portfolio companies. For a founder selling a new operating arrangement, that connection mattered: the investor had seen the company at work before joining its ownership.

Pick up the phone, even with all that technology

For someone whose career involves elaborate marketing systems, Colasante can be disarmingly plain about how to improve them. When marketing hands an account to sales, he recommends a conversation with the salesperson: explain the account, its history, and the reason it deserves attention. A change in process needs a person to make sense of it.

His ambitions for marketers extend into the executive suite. He has argued that marketing professionals should develop the sales understanding needed to take broader responsibility for revenue. In his view, the chief revenue officer’s job too often goes to someone whose experience is concentrated in sales. Marketing has to earn a larger part in that conversation.

Education belongs in the same picture. He has advocated access to formal learning and professional certifications, treating both as routes to advancement. It is a position consistent with his university work, and an especially practical concern in a business that depends on people learning new tools.

A founder changes his own job

In June 2026, the operating question reached Colasante’s own position. 2X acquired Knownwell, bringing AI engineering and commercial intelligence into the company. Knownwell founder David DeWolf became CEO. Colasante remained an active member of the leadership team as Founder.

DeWolf was already familiar with the business, having served on its board since 2023. The change therefore brought a longstanding colleague into the chief executive’s role as the company expanded its ambitions across marketing, sales, and customer success.

The transaction valued the combined business at more than $400 million. That is a company valuation, with several owners and an acquired business involved. The operational question underneath it is whether specialist people, software, and AI can work together with clearer accountability for clients.

“The future is human + AI.”

Domenic Colasante, June 2026

In August 2026, 2X marked its sixth consecutive appearance on the Inc. 5000, reporting 264 percent revenue growth over three years. The business continued to grow after its founder changed jobs. For someone who has spent years asking clients to reconsider their organizations, his own title now forms part of the experiment.

There are two useful scales for considering Colasante’s career. One measures a business across countries, investment rounds, and new technologies. The other measures the distance between a student and a classroom he may have to leave. He works on both. The second is a reminder that a well-designed system can have a very personal consequence.