In the Cheng household in Hong Kong, wanting a dog was not enough. Kelly Cheng and her three siblings had to make a case. They assembled a PowerPoint, divided the chores, and explained who would do what. Affection might begin the argument; operating detail had to close it. It is a charming bit of family bureaucracy, and a useful early glimpse of the marketer Cheng would become: persuasive, practical, and unwilling to leave ownership fuzzy.
Today she is chief marketing officer of Goldcast, the B2B event and video platform that joined Cvent in December 2025. Her working life is full of larger presentations and more consequential bets, but her instinct still runs toward the same questions. Who is this for? What happens next? Which person owns the follow-through? And can anyone prove the neat story in the spreadsheet reflects the considerably messier behavior of actual people?
Her answer to that last question is refreshingly impolite. “Any marketer that tells you they figured it out is lying to you,” she said when asked about complete attribution. Cheng uses data. She simply refuses to dress partial visibility as omniscience. The result is a marketing philosophy built around direction rather than theater, and patience rather than a quarterly sugar rush.
01 / The apprenticeshipA career assembled by moving toward the unfamiliar
Cheng was born and raised in Hong Kong, the second of four children. At 14, she left for Westminster School, a boarding school in Connecticut. She later described the transition with a quick joke: her parents shipped her off as soon as she became a teenager, “which was smart.” Boarding school felt, at least in memory, a little like camp. Boston College followed, then the less picturesque apprenticeship of agency media planning.
At PJA, she worked across media buying, creative, and account management for B2B clients. AMP Agency widened the mix to luxury and consumer goods. At Havas, she advanced into supervision, built her first team, and worked on the complicated attribution problems of Fidelity’s several businesses before moving to spirits brands including The Macallan and Rémy Martin. Agencies taught her range and stamina. They also showed her the ceiling of executing for someone else.
So she left without another role secured and headed west. Her sister and grandmother gave her a landing pad in the Bay Area. The harder task was explaining why an agency person belonged inside a startup. Cheng learned to reposition her own experience, absorbed the rejections, made a cold call, followed with a LinkedIn message, and landed at PagerDuty.
PagerDuty became her practical graduate school in growth. She owned paid search, worked on the lifecycle emails that carried users through a 14-day free trial, and ran experiments with product managers and engineers. The company served customers from tiny businesses to enterprises, so she could see product-led and sales-led economics operating side by side. She joined around its Series C and grew with it toward an IPO. The agency planner learned Salesforce, Marketo, MQLs, and the internal language of revenue.
She also kept the work playful. In one internal experiment, Cheng hid a promise of a $200 gift card inside a sales email to discover who was actually reading. The point was not the prize. It was the habit: when the expected response fails to arrive, vary the method and watch carefully.
02 / The pivotHired for growth, handed the whole machine
Cheng returned east, first to enterprise software company Dynatrace and then to Wistia. She joined Wistia two weeks before the pandemic sent demand for video upward. A growth goal meant for a year arrived in a month. The job became an accelerated study in freemium conversion, pricing, and product experience, all while marketing a product to other marketers.
In September 2021, a recruiter approached her about Goldcast. The initial brief was growth. The company expected a product-led motion with a free trial, but event software resisted the clean self-serve story. Every organization wanted a different look, flow, and level of support. A user could make a mistake in a high-visibility event and blame the platform. Goldcast moved toward sales-led growth, and Cheng did something career-defining: she moved with the evidence.
Her remit widened from experiments to the marketing organization. She hired around a simple first principle: a company selling event software to marketers should run events worth attending and publish content worth keeping. Brand, demand generation, product marketing, customer stories, operations, community, and eventually outbound gathered into the system. By 2025, she described a worldwide mix of roughly 30 full-time staff, freelancers, and agency partners.
PJA, AMP, and Havas turn media planning into a broad apprenticeship in audiences, accounts, and measurement.
A leap without a job becomes a growth role at PagerDuty, spanning acquisition, lifecycle, and product experiments.
Wistia becomes an abrupt laboratory for video demand and freemium conversion.
Goldcast hires Cheng for growth; a sales-led pivot expands the assignment into marketing leadership.
A CMO promotion, then Goldcast’s acquisition by Cvent, puts the long game inside a larger platform.
Goldcast said Cheng’s work across content, events, and demand generation helped support a 10x increase in annual recurring revenue from her arrival to her promotion as CMO in March 2025. The more revealing achievement may be how often the company changed shape during those years. It moved from virtual-event point solution toward an AI-powered platform for recording, repurposing, and measuring video. Cheng’s career grew with the repositioning because she had already learned not to confuse a plan with a law of nature.
03 / The runwayMarketing to the people who will care later
Cheng’s signature idea is “mindshare,” a word that can become foggy in less careful hands. Her version is concrete. At any moment, only a small slice of a B2B audience is actively shopping. Waiting for intent signals means arriving after those buyers have formed opinions and shortlists. Marketing’s longer job is to remain useful to everyone else so recognition exists before the sales conversation begins.
The audience beyond the pipeline
Cheng’s runway model directs attention toward the large majority who are not buying now. Content, events, community, and consistent human voices make the brand familiar before an intent tool notices demand.
That makes content a compounding asset rather than campaign debris. A webinar does not need to die as a forgotten recording. It can become clips, summaries, articles, sales follow-up, and a searchable library. Goldcast’s own repositioning followed that logic, and Cheng’s team applied it internally. In 2026, she said their AI-assisted engine was producing four to five times as many assets from each source piece.
More output, however, creates a rather modern danger: efficient blandness. Cheng’s answer is to move people upstream. Let software handle transcription, first drafts, distribution preparation, and the repetitive craft of resizing. Spend human attention on original ideas, editorial judgment, creative direction, and knowing an audience well enough to avoid sounding like everyone else with the same tools.
Her fondness for reality television becomes oddly useful here. Discussing Summer House, Cheng pointed to the value of continuity: familiar faces, development over seasons, and enough material between episodes to keep the audience invested. B2B brands often disappear between launches, then return expecting affection on schedule. Reality television understands that attention has a memory. Cheng’s version of “building in public” asks brands to show the experiments, the learning, and the occasional failure that make a story human.
04 / The operatorSystems for work that refuses to become certain
Long horizons do not make Cheng vague about operations. She themes her calendar. Monday is for preparing the week and comparing priorities with cross-functional leaders. Tuesday includes the marketing leadership meeting. The group maintains a running Notion document, with dated toggles stretching back to 2022, and focuses on the few priorities that matter now. The maxim behind it is plain: if you do not own the calendar, it owns you.
She has also been willing to redraw reporting lines. Goldcast moved its business development representatives under marketing because pipeline was the shared north star and outbound follow-up was inseparable from campaigns and webinars. Cheng discovered both the appeal and difficulty of the arrangement. Outbound could work, particularly when brand familiarity, clean data, timely signals, and shared tools reinforced one another. It also demanded what she called “tender loving care.” One virtual event produced 12 meetings during the session itself when BDRs used real-time attendance notifications to begin relevant conversations.
The lesson was not that every BDR team belongs in marketing. It was that an organization should follow the work across departmental borders. Event engagement, brand recognition, sales context, and follow-up speed all belonged to the same buyer experience, even if an org chart preferred separate boxes.
Cheng applies similar realism to leadership. Senior marketing jobs can be lonely, she has said, because the hardest organizational and go-to-market questions have few safe audiences inside a company. Mentors helped her cross that distance, including PagerDuty leader Rebecca Kline and G2 CMO Sydney Sloan. Cheng likens finding a mentor to dating: shared ground and mutual chemistry matter, and the title cannot be forced. She now points leaders toward peer communities where uncertainty can be spoken aloud.
Goldcast’s sale to Cvent gave Cheng’s long game a larger field. The December 2025 deal combined Goldcast’s video and AI workflows with Cvent’s reach across enterprise events. Cheng credited Goldcast’s founders for trusting her to build the brand, reposition the category, cultivate community, create the content strategy, and assemble the pipeline engine. Then she turned forward: “Let’s keep building.”
05 / What remains humanThe useful distance between efficiency and trust
Cheng now occupies a curious position. She markets an AI-powered content platform while arguing, with increasing emphasis, for the value of what the machine cannot supply on its own. Trust. Taste. A point of view earned by doing the work. The willingness to publish before every edge has been polished away, then return and show what changed.
Her career makes the case without needing a manifesto. The boarding-school teenager learned independence. The agency planner learned breadth. The job seeker learned to tell her own story. The growth marketer learned to experiment across a funnel. The CMO learned that people, budgets, and cross-functional trust are harder to optimize than a landing page. At each stage, the next role required giving up the comfort of being expert in the previous one.
The childhood dog presentation is funny because it contains the miniature adult. Yet its better lesson is not that Kelly Cheng was born making decks. It is that a wish became persuasive only when connected to a credible plan and people willing to own it. Her best marketing follows the same standard. Make the promise vivid. Keep the machinery honest. Show up long before the answer is due.