Keith
Putnam-Delaney

Keith Putnam-Delaney runs Primer, a San Francisco company that does something unglamorous and quietly difficult: it connects the professional version of you - the work email, the job title, the company - to the personal identity that ad platforms actually use to find people. Upload a list of work emails. Primer enriches it, matches it across Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and the rest, and orchestrates the campaign that follows. The pitch is one line. The engineering underneath it is not.

That gap - simple promise, hard machinery - is the whole business. B2B marketers live in a world built for selling sneakers and streaming subscriptions. The big advertising platforms were designed for consumers, so the standard B2B channels (LinkedIn, search, email) get crowded and expensive fast. Keith's bet is that the buyers are still out there on the consumer platforms; you just have to translate who they are at work into who they are when the ad serves. Primer is the translation layer.

He calls Primer an intelligence layer for B2B marketing. In practice that means enriching leads, matching them across platforms, and moving data between ad networks, social tools, and sales systems without a human stitching spreadsheets together at 2 a.m. The company's investors include Salesforce Ventures, and in late 2022 Primer raised a $12 million Series A. None of that is the interesting part. The interesting part is who built it.

Before the cap table and the cross-platform matching, Keith Putnam-Delaney stood in front of a classroom teaching high-school history. It is the kind of detail that gets buried under a LinkedIn title, and it is also the most useful thing to know about him. Teaching history is, at bottom, the work of explaining why complicated systems behave the way they do. He has been doing a version of that ever since.

He studied International Relations at Brown University and spent time at Sciences Po in Paris. From there came brand and marketing strategy work for large, legacy companies - the kind of accounts where the brand is older than everyone in the room. Then he made the jump that defines the rest of the story: into startups, into growth, into the part of marketing that lives or dies by a number.

At Dropbox, between 2014 and 2016, he helped build out the marketing for Dropbox for Business during the company's fast-growth years. At Eden, a Y Combinator company, he ran growth as Head of Growth and helped take revenue from roughly $30,000 to about $20 million in two years. That is not a typo and it is not a rounding flourish - it is the kind of curve that teaches a person exactly how a go-to-market machine is wired, because they built the wiring.

The idea for Primer arrived sideways, the way good ideas usually do. After Eden, Keith consulted and advised - including stints advising Stack Sports and Bungalow - and kept noticing the same thing across clients: he was building the same data-engineering and audience-creation systems over and over. The pattern was the product. He just had to be willing to see it.

Here is the part that makes the story honest. Keith was hesitant to start Primer. Martech is famously, exhaustingly crowded - thousands of logos on a slide that gets remade every year, each one promising to fix the same funnel. Entering it on purpose sounds less like ambition and more like a dare.

But the demand kept showing up in his consulting work, client after client, and reluctance lost to evidence. He and co-founder Juan Vasquez, Primer's CTO, built an MVP. Within roughly nine months it reached about $1 million in revenue. The crowded category turned out to have a specific, unfilled gap right where Keith had been standing the whole time.

His advice to other B2B marketers reads like a man describing his own career in reverse: keep your finger on the pulse of what's changing, and look for the overlooked opening instead of joining the stampede toward the obvious one. It is the contrarian's posture, but earned - he ignored the herd into the crowded room and found the empty seat.