Michelle Cobb has spent most of her career making invisible things visible. A computer network is full of unseen routes, permissions and weaknesses. A market is crowded with needs that customers do not always know how to name. A forest, for all its obvious greenery, hides its decisive work underground and over decades: seed supply, soil, water, local stewardship, finance, monitoring and time. Cobb began as an engineer. She now leads communications and marketing at Terraformation. The nouns changed. The habit of mind did not.
Terraformation introduces her with a three-part description: climate storyteller, B2B growth expert, former engineer. The order feels almost literary, but the engineering comes first in the chronology. Cobb earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from the University of Michigan in 1987. At GE Medical Systems, she worked in software and technical support. Her early professional life was spent close to machines and the people puzzled by them, a good apprenticeship for any future translator.
The engineer leaves the terminal, but keeps the method
Cobb moved from engineering into product management, then into marketing for information technology. An MBA in corporate strategy and marketing, completed with high distinction at Michigan's Ross School of Business in 1999, gave the shift a formal vocabulary. What followed was not a retreat from technical work. It was a move to the border where technology must explain itself to buyers, partners and executives.
Her route ran through enterprise-software companies that rewarded fluency in both architecture and appetite. She led solutions marketing at Volera, product and channel marketing at Corvigo, product marketing at McAfee, and product and partner marketing at LogLogic. Between 2007 and 2009 she ran Spire Marketing, then joined Skybox Security in 2010 as Vice President of Worldwide Marketing.
The booth, the bias and the calm answer
One episode from those product years did more than test her composure. Cobb was standing at a trade-show booth, ready to explain a new secure content-delivery device. A visitor cut her off and said he wanted to speak with someone who knew something. She was the product manager. She also knew precisely how the product worked.
Cobb later wrote that she was furious inside but calmly answered his technical questions. The restraint is memorable. So is what she did with the insult afterward. She turned it into an argument about the environment that technology conferences create. The widespread use of sexualized promotional models, she concluded, did not merely embarrass individual women. It primed visitors to doubt the competence of women who were there to do technical work.
“Although I was seething inside, I managed to calmly answer his questions about my product.”Michelle Johnson Cobb, 2015
When the RSA Conference tightened its rules against that practice, Cobb applauded the change and joined a panel called “Breaking the Glass Firewall.” Her advocacy continued beyond one conference. In 2018, she published an article on women as an underused source of talent in cybersecurity, a field already complaining about a severe skills gap. Her point was practical as much as moral: an industry cannot lament a labor shortage while maintaining a culture that drives capable people away.
Learning to sell sight
At Skybox, Cobb's subject was the whole network. The company's software assembled data from scattered security tools into a model that helped teams see attack paths, policy problems and vulnerable assets in context. She spent seven years as worldwide marketing vice president and three more as chief marketing officer. A federal filing later described her contribution in plain terms: expanding the company's market foothold across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific.
The language of cybersecurity can become a fog of alerts and acronyms. Cobb's public explanations kept returning to a simpler problem: organizations cannot protect what they cannot see. In a 2017 interview at Black Hat, she reminded companies that moving assets into the cloud did not move responsibility elsewhere. In another explanation, she compared cyber defense to eye surgery. Reaction time sounded impressive, but prevention and a complete model of risk mattered more. “Real time just isn't fast enough,” she wrote.
Former colleagues describe the person behind the disciplined message. One called her unflappable, thoughtful, direct and forward-looking. Another remembered a leader who invited individual opinions, creating a team where assertiveness and authority could coexist with diplomacy. These are recommendations, not laboratory measurements, but they harmonize with the trade-show story: feel the heat, answer the question, then improve the room.
From concentrated sunlight to living infrastructure
After leaving Skybox in 2020, Cobb advised companies through 4IMPACT Marketing and served as vice chair of Appropriate Technology Collaborative, a nonprofit that develops sustainable technologies with communities. In 2022 she became Senior Vice President of Marketing at Heliogen, whose technology concentrated sunlight for industrial energy. The move brought climate from a theme in the distance to the center of the work.
Then came Terraformation in 2024. The company backs native forest restoration with training, technology and access to finance. Cobb became Chief Communications Officer and Vice President of Marketing. Her audience now includes restoration teams, corporations, carbon buyers, investors and people who simply want to know whether another tree-planting promise has roots beneath it.
That last distinction matters. Planting day makes an excellent picture. Forest recovery makes a demanding operating model. Native seeds must be sourced and stored. Nurseries must produce the right species. Communities need meaningful authority and durable benefit. Projects require capital before carbon revenue arrives. Progress must be monitored for years, and a biodiverse ecosystem cannot be reduced to a single cheerful counter.
A forest project survives when the parts reinforce one another. Communication sits between them, translating without pretending they are interchangeable.
Make the future imaginable
Cobb's 2025 essay after New York Climate Week reveals how she thinks about this assignment. She argues that nature belongs inside business strategy because companies depend on functioning ecosystems through their supply chains, assets and operating conditions. Forests, soils and watersheds become infrastructure in this telling. The language is deliberately legible to an executive, but it does not stop at a quarterly calculation.
Her sharper argument concerns mood. Climate communication has accumulated an excess of alarm and an insufficiency of agency. Facts remain essential, but another graph of catastrophe can leave its audience numb. Cobb wants stories that are trustworthy and simple, stories that connect climate action to ordinary concerns and show people where they can participate. “Joy, purpose, and imagination,” she writes, are climate resources.
“When people can see their role in the solution, they show up.”Michelle Johnson Cobb, 2025
There is nothing soft about that observation. Participation is an operating requirement. A native forest cannot be rebuilt by software alone, and capital cannot manufacture local legitimacy. Cobb writes approvingly about technology that learns alongside Indigenous and community knowledge rather than replacing it. Artificial intelligence can help model growth and monitor recovery. It cannot retroactively invent the reciprocal relationships that sustained a place before the model arrived.
This is where her two careers meet most cleanly. Cybersecurity taught Cobb to distrust a view assembled from one instrument. Forest restoration demands the same humility on a grander scale. Carbon is measurable and important, but it is not the forest. A satellite can see canopy change, but it cannot alone explain whether livelihoods improved or whether the right species returned. The useful picture comes from joining signals.
In 2025, Cobb carried that joined-up view into a Trellis session on nature-based carbon projects and Terraformation's Climate Week conversations. In 2026, the company listed her among its team attending SF Climate Week. These appearances fit her role, but also her long pattern: stand where a complicated product meets a skeptical room and make the full system easier to see.
A career of changing nouns
It is tempting to describe Cobb's move from cybersecurity to climate as reinvention. The more interesting reading is continuity. At GE Medical Systems, the system joined software to a human user. At Skybox, it joined devices, data and decisions. At Heliogen, mirrors and software concentrated sunlight into industrial heat. At Terraformation, seed banks, nurseries, communities, finance and monitoring must align long enough for a forest to become itself.
The scale has expanded and the stakes have changed, but her work still begins with translation. She reads structure, finds the point where confusion becomes inaction, and builds a clearer account. She has also learned, in public and occasionally the hard way, that the person explaining the system may first have to challenge the assumptions in the room.
A forest is an unruly thing to market. It grows on its own timetable, contains more relationships than a brochure can hold, and pays no attention to a launch calendar. That may be exactly why an engineer-storyteller belongs near it. The job is not to make the living world sound simple. It is to make its complexity useful enough that more people can help it endure.