In 2008, Kathleen Shanahan went to London looking for business. Her idea was specific: European technology startups would need someone who could help them enter the American market. She toured marketing and public relations agencies, hoping to build relationships across the Atlantic. Looking back, she described a market that was not entirely ready. An inconvenient detail, perhaps, when you have already made the journey.
Yet the trip produced connections. Among the people she remembers are Huddle marketers Lucy Wimmer and Zuzanna Wilson, and its founders Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin. Huddle turned to BOCA to reach the US. The ambition had found a practical expression: people with a product on one side of the ocean, people who understood an audience on the other.
That early journey offers a useful way into Shanahan’s career. She has spent it working on the distance between what a technology company builds and what other people understand. Her own business has required a second kind of translation: turning a communications practitioner’s judgment into an organization that can keep doing the work.
A family business, without inheriting the business
Shanahan’s account of entrepreneurship begins well before BOCA. Her grandfather worked digging ditches during the Great Depression before starting a business. Her parents owned a business. Her sister owns one too. Ownership was already a familiar occupation in the family by the time she chose it for herself.
She calls herself a California native with an entrepreneurial spirit. The family history gives that description some weight. Starting a company can sound like an abrupt conversion when told from the outside. In her telling, it also belongs to a sequence of ordinary, consequential decisions made by relatives. There is a difference between inheriting a company and growing up with evidence that a person can build one.
Her education supplied an unexpected pairing for a future technology communicator. At the University of California, Berkeley, she earned bachelor’s degrees in history and the history of art. Her LinkedIn profile lists her Berkeley years as 1990 to 1994. Neither subject comes with a ready-made instruction manual for selling enterprise software.
Both, however, invite close attention to context: what something means, who is looking at it, and how a particular interpretation takes hold. It is tempting to draw a straight line from those degrees to her later work. Careers are rarely that obliging. What the combination does establish is that her route into technology began with the humanities.
Before advising the chief executive
Before founding BOCA, Shanahan worked as a vice president at Eastwick and Schwartz MSL. She also oversaw global corporate communications at Wind River Systems, working with executives on corporate and product strategy. Her experience included helping the leadership team reposition the company around device software optimization.
That work placed communications near decisions about the business itself. A category description affects the company a buyer thinks they are considering. The words on the page arrive after arguments about products, markets and priorities. Shanahan had experience inside those conversations, as well as experience representing companies from an agency.
BOCA began as an independent consultancy in December 2008, advising chief executives on marketing communications. In 2010, she began building it into a digital PR agency. Those two stages matter. A consultancy can organize itself around one person’s experience. An agency needs a way to make that experience useful through other people.
In March 2018, Shanahan hired Merrill Freund as BOCA’s first general manager and executive vice president. They had worked together at Schwartz, where he had been a mentor. By then, BOCA had also moved from San Francisco’s North Beach to Union Square. An organization that began around her advice was adding another experienced leader.
Freund’s appointment put an existing relationship to a new use. He was brought in to support client service, expand services and develop business. For a founder, hiring someone who has already seen you work carries a particular advantage: the introductory meeting happened years ago.
The client who came back
One way to understand a communications agency is to watch what happens when its client changes jobs. Lara Shackelford worked with BOCA at DataStax and later at Altify. She returned to the agency, then described the relationship in a recommendation on Shanahan’s LinkedIn profile.
At DataStax, the assignment involved raising the company’s profile during the surge of interest in big data. At Altify, a company headquartered in Ireland, the work included building visibility in Silicon Valley and US media, and supporting the rebrand from The TAS Group to Altify.
The second assignment brings Shanahan’s original transatlantic interest back into view. A company can have customers, a history and a functioning business, yet still need an introduction in another market. A new name adds another complication. The work requires understanding what should travel with the company and what needs explaining afresh.
Shackelford emphasized BOCA’s understanding of the client’s own customers and its connection to business goals. That is a more useful compliment than a general declaration of enthusiasm. It describes what the agency was being trusted to understand.
The senior person stays in the room
In January 2026, Shanahan set out her view of leadership in terms that leave little room for ceremonial management: “To me, leadership is participation.” She wants senior people involved in positioning, briefs, media pitches and the review of headlines, with an eye on what happens after a campaign launches.
There is a recognizable organizational problem behind that preference. The person who helps win an account can become less visible once the work begins. Shanahan’s stated model keeps senior judgment close to execution. The person who understands why a message was chosen should still be around when someone tries to use it.
Her impatience with excessive deliberation is explicit. She describes wanting people who figure things out, and complains about meetings in which people become immobilized by their own discussion. One can imagine the minutes of such a meeting becoming considerably shorter under that rule.
The preference also helps explain why she talks about in-house experience. Knowing the pressures inside a client organization gives an agency another way to judge its recommendations. A beautifully phrased proposal still has to survive the product team, the sales conversation and the person responsible for the budget.
The founder has a spreadsheet, too
Another January 2026 reflection makes the business owner visible behind the marketing practitioner. Shanahan described handling creative campaigns while also managing a profit-and-loss statement, staffing, growth and employee education. The agency’s work for clients exists alongside the work of keeping the agency running.
She said BOCA had ended 2025 with two new business wins. For 2026, her preferred phrase was “organized, calculated growth.” Serving existing clients while adding new ones was a balancing act. The ambition came with a staffing calculation, which is generally where attractive growth plans discover their manners.
She also described plans to recruit across US time zones and internationally, with a vision for small groups in Buenos Aires and India. These were intentions she set out for the year. They reveal the geography of her thinking: an agency rooted in San Francisco, considering how people elsewhere might help it serve clients.
“organized, calculated growth”
Kathleen Shanahan, January 2026
The phrase is revealing precisely because it is restrained. Shanahan’s family story begins with business ownership. Her contemporary account returns to the owner’s practical questions: how much work can the team take on, whom should it hire, and how can expansion fit the commitments already made?
What happens after the headline?
By 2022, BOCA had introduced Elevate, an employee curriculum covering digital PR, inbound marketing and revenue operations. Shanahan was describing a PR business that thought in terms of generating demand. Teaching employees those concepts gave the ambition an internal mechanism.
Her public industry involvement also included PRSA Silicon Valley’s agency advisory board in 2021. In September 2022, she appeared in its FridayForum conversation about owning a business and creating a future. That discussion placed her founder’s experience before other communications professionals.
Her later comments on trade shows make the commercial question concrete. She objects to companies spending heavily on events and returning with little beyond promotional merchandise and badge scans. She wants advance outreach, useful encounters at the event and disciplined follow-up afterward.
A bag of branded souvenirs is tangible. A list of scans can be exported. Neither automatically tells a sales team what to do on Monday morning. Shanahan’s argument asks marketers to account for that next step. It is the same pressure she applies to communications more broadly: attention should lead somewhere.
A story that can survive its own distribution
In January 2026, she described a content operation organized around a common narrative, with written material, video, social posts and sales assets developing from shared ideas. Her concern was coherence as production expands. More output gives a company more opportunities to contradict itself.
The approach favors recording a substantive video conversation, then using it to inform written pieces and shorter excerpts. It also reflects her interest in how companies appear through AI search. These are her prescriptions for a changing communications environment, with the story serving as a reference point across formats.
There is room for a less technical voice, too. When introducing The BOCA Beat in February 2025, she promised opinions, educational discussion and occasional personal stories. She wanted the space to include challenges and lessons as well as successes. Her company biography adds a compact personal detail in Spanish: she is a mother of two daughters.
That mixture suits a founder whose work involves making other companies understandable. There are the campaign plans and the operating decisions; there is also a person willing to put her own views into circulation. The journey that took her to London began with a proposed connection between two markets. The business she continues to describe depends on connections of a smaller scale: a senior colleague who stays involved, a client who returns, a message someone can actually use.