At a Costco, somewhere between the practical bulk purchases and the mild delirium of buying forty-eight of anything, Don Jeter noticed a Grave Digger toy. The black-and-green monster truck had the kind of instant recognition most enterprise software companies spend millions trying to manufacture. Jeter saw more than a toy. He saw a vehicle, in every sense of the word, for Torq.
The idea eventually grew into a six-city Monster Jam campaign and a full-size Grave Digger at Torq's RSAC 2025 booth. Around it sat the rest of Torq's peculiar universe: a flaming skeleton, the declaration that “SOAR is dead,” merchandise with the confidence of a streetwear drop, and a security product built for the decidedly serious work of automating incident response.
It is tempting to call this a stunt and move on. Jeter would probably enjoy the word, then ask what the stunt did for pipeline. His work is flamboyant at the surface and dutiful underneath. Attention leads to a demo. A demo leads to a proof of concept. A proof of concept, when the product earns it, leads to revenue. The monster truck does not replace that chain. It gets somebody to look up long enough for the chain to begin.
The Jeter attention-to-revenue circuit
The category wore a uniform
Cybersecurity is full of urgent products presented in an oddly sleepy visual language. Walk a large conference floor and the booths begin to rhyme: cool blues, futuristic grids, a race car, an assertion about autonomous intelligence. The terminology shifts faster than the scenery. “AI-powered” gives way to “AI-native,” which gives way to “agentic,” while the buyer keeps walking.
Jeter calls it an epidemic of sameness. His diagnosis is not merely aesthetic. If fifty companies tell roughly the same story in roughly the same costume, the customer has no useful reason to remember company number fifty-one. Creative direction becomes part of category strategy. The marketer must signal a difference before there is time to explain one.
At Torq, the signal is Skelly, a fire-lit skeleton who looks as if heavy-metal cover art took a job in security operations. The character supports a clear argument: the legacy category of security orchestration, automation and response has reached its end, and a faster form of automation belongs in its place. A mascot without an argument is decoration. An argument without an image becomes another paragraph at a booth. Torq made the two travel together.
“Brand's a moat, but that moat's dug by the product.”Don Jeter
That sentence is Jeter's guardrail. Brand can create familiarity, lower the cost of the next conversation and make a salesperson welcome at the table. It cannot compensate forever for a weak experience. The visual world writes a check. The product has to cash it.
The startup was the playground
Jeter did not begin with monster trucks. His earlier career ran through Symantec and Veritas, large technology companies that gave him a view of enterprise selling and field marketing. Then, in 2016, he joined Pax8. The cloud marketplace had about 25 employees, a three-person marketing team and roughly $5 million in revenue. The cloud channel itself still needed explaining.
By the time he left in early 2023, Pax8 employed more than 1,500 people and had passed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue. Marketing had grown to nearly 40 people around the world. Jeter rose from senior director to senior vice president of global marketing, learning category creation while the category formed under his feet.
The experience clarified a preference. Jeter likes disruptive products, leadership teams willing to take them to market, and the room to make things that comes with a startup. Large enterprises taught him the machinery. Pax8 showed him the pleasure of rebuilding it while it ran.
Torq's founders began talking with him well before he joined. Jeter has described roughly a year of conversations with CEO Ofer Smadari and exposure to the board. He laid out the creative playbook early, including Liquid Death as proof that a dull category could gain cultural voltage through packaging and tone. Alignment came before audacity. The spectacular part was negotiated patiently.
First, market to the marketers
One of Jeter's most transferable lessons has nothing to do with trucks. Marketing starts with the internal audience. Employees and salespeople have to feel the story before customers will. A campaign that makes the sales team eager to carry it has passed an important test; a campaign they apologize for is already in trouble.
He describes his team as a jam band. The metaphor avoids the dreary corporate language of alignment while making the operating model clear. Everyone knows the song. Skilled players listen to one another. A direction exists, but no spreadsheet dictates every note. An improvised idea can become the part the audience remembers.
The jam has produced wonderfully specific artifacts. At RSAC 2026, a tattoo bus completed 99 real tattoos. Torq has staged CISO karaoke, inflated a 40-foot Skelly and hired former professional-wrestling commentator Joel Gertner to place the company in his knowingly absurd “Mystical Quartile.” These ideas share a world. None feels borrowed from the standard software-marketing cupboard.
“You have to inspire your internal audience first.”Don Jeter
The management philosophy beneath the noise is similarly spare: hire smart people and get out of their way. Jeter does not mean an absence of direction. Torq's work is too visually coherent for that. He means giving talented specialists a defined world, a commercial objective and permission to surprise one another.
Taste after infinite output
Generative AI has made it easy to produce a respectable quantity of respectable marketing. That abundance sharpens Jeter's complaint. When everybody has access to similar tools, the difference moves upstream. Taste, judgment and creative direction matter more because production itself is less scarce.
This is especially awkward in cybersecurity, where every vendor can ask a model for a glowing network, a solemn shield and fifteen synonyms for autonomous. More output can deepen sameness. Jeter's response is human and inconvenient: decide what you believe, develop references beyond your competitors, and build a world with enough specificity that nobody could swap in another logo.
His reference shelf ranges beyond B2B. Liquid Death demonstrates the power of a challenger identity. A24 shows how a studio can become a signal of taste. Streetwear understands drops, symbols and belonging. Even Grave Digger arrives with decades of recognition already baked into the paint. Jeter borrows the cultural mechanics, then connects them to an enterprise buying journey.
That connection matters because enterprise buying is an ensemble performance. The person who notices Torq may not control the budget. The analyst who likes the demo may need a CISO, procurement team and finance leader to agree. A recognizable brand gives those people a common object to discuss. It can shorten the explanation from “one of several security automation vendors” to “the skeleton company with the monster truck.” This is not the whole sale, though it is a remarkably efficient first sentence.
Jeter also refuses the old argument that brand and demand live on opposite sides of the marketing department. In his model, they are the same motion viewed at different distances. A live event can create a memory, a conversation and a qualified meeting. A piece of merchandise can signal membership while putting the logo into another room. The creative idea carries emotional force; the operating team builds the route that captures it.
This is why the work feels designed rather than merely loud. The details repeat without becoming copies: Skelly, the black-and-neon palette, the mock funeral for SOAR, the collision of security jargon with internet culture. Repetition builds recognition. Variation keeps the joke alive. The discipline resembles a television series more than a quarterly campaign, with familiar characters entering new situations while the central argument stays put.
Sales and field marketing at Symantec and Veritas.
Pax8, from senior director to SVP of global marketing during a period of rapid scale.
Joins Torq as chief marketing officer.
Builds Torq's RSAC world around Grave Digger, Skelly, tattoos and the AI SOC category.
The product keeps the promise
By January 2026, Torq had raised a $140 million Series D at a $1.2 billion valuation, with $332 million in total funding. The company reported hundreds of multinational enterprise customers and millions of security tasks handled autonomously. Those are company outcomes, not trophies belonging to one marketer. They are also the context that gives Jeter's brand argument weight. The strange world sits beside real adoption.
His career suggests a tidy sequence for operators. Find a product that changes how work gets done. Secure leadership agreement about the story. Build a team capable of translating that story into a recognizable world. Give them room to play. Trace the attention through demos and proof. Keep the product close enough to puncture every indulgent idea.
The irony is delightful: the marketer dressed like a trucker-capped agent of chaos is a committed systems thinker. He worries about measurement, organizational buy-in, category timing and the handoff to sales. The skeleton is not an escape from the funnel. It is the fellow waving traffic toward it.
There will be more booths, more AI claims and presumably more vehicles. Jeter's useful wager is that enterprise buyers remain people. They notice confidence. They enjoy jokes. They remember a world that knows what it believes. And after the monster truck has done its noisy work, they still expect the software to work quietly.