At fourteen, Manny Ataebi could quote the price of movement through New York. Midtown East to JFK was $33. Midtown East to Trenton was $84. This was before an app priced the ride, before a blue dot glided across a map, before a passenger could watch a driver miss the turn in real time. Ataebi kept the books for a car-service business, calculating vouchers from paper rate sheets and accounting for stops, waiting time and destination. He memorized hundreds of fares because speed mattered and error had a human face. Get the number wrong and, a week later, an angry driver might arrive to explain the arithmetic in less diplomatic terms.
It was a curious first education for a future chief marketing officer: a little mathematics, a little operations, a little trust. The owner let the teenager run test calculations. Ataebi got them right. Eventually the business computerized the work, making much of his careful mental machinery redundant. He moved toward booking rides and calling for customers. In miniature, his career had already appeared: understand the system, help automate it, then turn toward the market.
A programmer walks into marketing
Ataebi did not arrive in technology marketing by memorizing a list of approved adjectives. He taught himself to build websites, first on the front end and then behind it. Over six years as a developer, his toolkit widened to PHP, JavaScript and Java, with excursions into ColdFusion and JSP. He remembers some of those older technologies without nostalgia, which may be the healthiest possible relationship with an old stack.
The coding years gave him a lasting advantage. Technical products often come wrapped in the language of their makers: accurate, dense and faintly allergic to ordinary conversation. Ataebi could follow the machinery without being imprisoned by its vocabulary. He has described the marketer’s central job as taking something difficult, technical and feature-heavy and turning it into a story a buyer understands. Within a month of entering a new technical category, he said, he could be explaining virtual machines and hypervisors. Fluency came from knowing how builders think.
His university education added a second bridge. At the University at Albany, he studied Business and Psychology as a double major. One discipline asks how value travels. The other asks why people move. Put them beside six years of code and the career begins to look less like reinvention than assembly.
“When you work on your messaging, you start with the sales messaging before you even look at the website.”Manny Ataebi
The message earns its place
Ataebi’s method for positioning has the pragmatism of a developer testing a release. The website is not the laboratory. Customer calls are. He starts with the language salespeople use, listens to conversations, studies what buyers understand and hands new phrasing to sales development representatives and account executives. The message is allowed to bump into reality before it is polished for the homepage.
This reverses a familiar corporate ritual. Too often, marketing writes the grand sentence first and the sales team discovers its defects later. Ataebi wants the discovery deck and the conversation to do the rough work. If prospects look baffled, the phrase has failed its test. If the language repeatedly opens a useful discussion, it can graduate to public copy. A company’s message, in this view, is not a monument. It is working software.
That practicality also governs his relationship with metrics. He argues that marketing and sales should share a definition of qualified pipeline: the right person at the right company, a real use case, multiple stakeholders and a serious evaluation. A thousand names from a webinar may decorate a slide. They do not settle whether the company is creating viable business. Pipeline is where the story has to meet evidence.
Sixty for now, twenty for memory, twenty for surprise
On a podcast, Ataebi was handed a fictional company called Cyber Donut, a $20 million Series A and the pleasant burden of deciding how to spend the marketing share. His answer was not a shopping list. He worked backward from revenue, sales capacity and the maturity of the sales motion. More traffic poured into a broken funnel merely produces a larger leak.
His rule of thumb was 60-20-20. Sixty percent of the budget serves the current quarter and the next: sales development, events and programs that create immediate opportunities. Twenty percent builds the brand over a longer horizon, making tomorrow’s outreach less cold and future acquisition less expensive. The remaining twenty percent belongs to experiments. Try intent data. Try a comic video. Try the idea that sounds slightly improper in a spreadsheet.
The charm of the formula is that it protects three versions of the company at once. The present company needs meetings. The future company needs to be remembered. The learning company needs permission to be wrong. Ataebi expects most experiments to vanish quietly. Four out of five may fail to travel. The one that does can enter the private group chats where buyers exchange things they genuinely found useful or funny. No one forwards a product one-pager for pleasure.
This is not whimsy at the expense of discipline. Ataebi wants short- and long-term programs judged against the same commercial picture. The entertaining campaign should still connect to the company’s message. The event should create useful conversations. The SDR function should not parrot brochure language; it should help test it. Brand and pipeline occupy different clocks, but they live in the same business.
A career built in the difficult middle
Across more than fifteen years of go-to-market leadership, Ataebi has repeatedly joined early- and mid-stage B2B software companies, the stretch where a founder’s instinct must become a repeatable system. He led marketing at Logicworks and Ghostery, both of which later figured in acquisitions. In 2018, he joined Stensul as vice president of marketing and sales development. By 2022, he was leading worldwide marketing and sales development at cloud-security company Sonrai Security.
Then came Demostack, a product-demonstration platform, where he served as chief marketing officer. The company’s subject was almost autobiographical: help sales teams show complicated software clearly, without dragging engineers into every presentation. In 2025, Pavilion included him among its 50 CMOs to Watch. That same year, he publicly discussed the less ornamental side of leadership: coaching, hard conversations, role fit and the damage caused when a manager allows feedback to arrive as a surprise.
His hiring language is blunt. Early-stage teams need “creative grinders,” people who are not rattled by change and can make something from very little. In another conversation, he emphasized street smarts, work ethic and what he calls fire in the belly. The phrases are informal, but the underlying test is precise: can this person act without the comfort of a mature system, and can they help construct the one they wish existed?
Marketing leadership across ConveyIQ, Logicworks and Ghostery.
Joins Stensul as VP of Marketing and Sales Development.
Leads worldwide marketing and sales development at Sonrai Security.
Serves as Demostack CMO and appears on Pavilion’s 50 CMOs to Watch.
Moves from Bettermode CRO to Cerby Chief Marketing Officer.
The return to cyber
For three years, Ataebi worked in MarTech and RevTech. The last part of that run was at Bettermode, a community-software company where he took the broader title of chief revenue officer. People had nudged him toward the full jump to revenue leadership for years. He accepted it, led a team he spoke of warmly, then found the next turn through a relationship already in progress.
Ataebi had met Cerby co-founder and chief executive Belsasar Lepe roughly three years earlier. He became a formal adviser and told Lepe that they should work together someday. The line might have remained one of those agreeable future promises that executives make between meetings. Instead, the two were on an adviser call when Lepe mentioned an opening. Both recognized the timing. In May 2026, Ataebi announced that he was returning to cybersecurity as Cerby’s chief marketing officer.
The brief joins the strands of his career neatly. Cerby works on identity security for disconnected applications, the stubborn software that does not support standards such as SAML, SCIM or familiar APIs. These applications resist the clean controls companies rely on for sign-on, provisioning and deprovisioning. The technology tries to extend modern identity automation into that awkward remainder.
Ataebi now oversees brand, product marketing, demand generation and sales development. In other words, he owns both the sentence and its journey into the market. His revenue detour at Bettermode matters here. A CMO who has carried the CRO title has seen the funnel from the other chair. It becomes harder to celebrate attention that never becomes a qualified opportunity, and easier to understand why salespeople distrust language no buyer uses.
“The pipeline number is kind of the end all be all metric.”Manny Ataebi
Complexity, translated
Cerby gives Ataebi a story with a built-in contradiction. The company focuses on applications most employees barely notice as a category. They are simply the tools a team needs, except they sit outside the standards that make identity security manageable. The technical gap is invisible until an account lingers after an employee leaves, a shared password travels too far or an audit asks an inconvenient question.
A weaker marketer might solve this by adding acronyms. Ataebi’s career suggests a different route: learn the product deeply, listen to the people selling and buying it, find the words that survive a live conversation, and measure whether those words produce serious evaluation. Keep some budget for the quarter, some for memory and some for the idea nobody can quite defend yet.
The teenager with the rate sheet would recognize the operating system. Know the route. Price it carefully. Expect the real world to check your work.