Ross Durbin and the case for less software work

Ross Durbin has a peculiar complaint for someone who sells software: software keeps giving people too much to do. Another setting to configure. Another folder to inspect. Another perfectly reasonable request that arrives while somebody is trying to finish something else. His company, Collage, operates in digital asset management, a category whose tidy name conceals a very untidy human activity: getting the right photograph, video, logo or document to the person who needs it.

Durbin’s argument begins after the upload. A brand has collected its files. Someone has organized them. Then an agency needs a campaign image, a retailer wants a product photograph, and a colleague asks where the approved version lives. The collection exists; the interruptions continue. A well-appointed filing cabinet can still require a full-time concierge.

That gap gives his story its shape. Based in Denver, the Collage co-founder became CEO in February 2026. He is building around a question that is smaller, and more demanding, than how many features a platform can offer: how much work can it remove from somebody’s Tuesday?

A company begins inside an agency

Collage’s beginnings were practical. Huebner Marketing, an agency in Fort Collins, had developed a basic asset-management platform internally. Durbin connected with the agency about commercializing it. Jim Huebner contributed the existing code in exchange for equity, giving the venture something concrete to build upon.

In summer 2024, Daniel Campbell joined Durbin to launch Collage. Campbell brought 12 years of sales experience at Brandfolder. Durbin was Head of Product; Campbell initially held the CEO role. Their opening was the space between everyday cloud storage and software designed for much larger organizations. Growing companies had enough content to need help, without necessarily having the staff or budget to administer an elaborate system.

The origin matters because the product grew from a working need. An agency had already encountered the problem and made something to address it. Durbin and Campbell’s task was to turn that starting point into a business other teams could use. Before there was a market position to articulate, there was code and a customer-shaped problem.

The product person takes the top job

Durbin arrived at that point with more than a decade in digital asset management, cloud and marketing technology product development. His background includes work at Outside Interactive. On LinkedIn, he lists the University of Missouri-Columbia and studies in environmental and multicultural subjects. His route into software includes a marketing-consultant role at Dex Media, where a former colleague praised his willingness to learn products and help customers.

There is a useful continuity between learning a product well enough to explain it and questioning whether a customer should have to learn quite so much. Durbin’s public work keeps returning to the burden placed on the user. The feature may exist. The more interesting question is whether anyone can get useful work done with it.

Collage announced his CEO appointment on February 10, 2026, alongside plans to use recent investment to develop the platform. Investors included Luke Beatty and Mike Gellman; former Brandfolder CEO Steve Baker was on the board. Durbin’s next chapter came with people around him who knew the category and the Colorado technology business.

The audience beyond the folder

In his February 2026 interview, Durbin described two audiences: the people managing brand content and the people using it. Agencies, sales teams and retail partners belong in the second group. Their experience is part of the product’s job, even when they sit outside the company paying the bill.

That thinking shows up in branded portals, share links, embeds and permissions. A useful asset library has to let material travel with the right access attached. Durbin’s ambition is for Collage to become infrastructure for brand content, with organization and distribution working together. The promise has an everyday test: can the recipient reach the thing without recruiting someone else to fetch it?

“When distribution isn’t central to the DAM, teams default to workarounds: email attachments, shared drives, Slack threads.” The list is familiar enough to be faintly comic. Companies can purchase specialized software and still end up conducting business through the digital equivalent of passing notes.

A founder admits the spreadsheet was insufficient

Durbin’s own company had an operational version of this problem. Early customer relations relied on a spreadsheet containing renewal dates and contact information. The team answered questions, but the timing and purpose of outreach were loose. Customers tended to ask about features they already knew, leaving other possibilities unexplored.

Collage brought in Rebel Maven seven months into its initial sales cycle to improve post-sale operations. Durbin described the earlier approach as responsive rather than strategic. The work shifted toward more intentional engagement and a clearer understanding of each customer’s business. Campbell, too, described a change in onboarding: the team began asking why assets were moving and which should move first.

It is an appealingly unglamorous episode in a founder story. A company promising to simplify work needed help making its own work more deliberate. Durbin’s account leaves room for outside expertise. Good intentions and an available calendar had carried the team only so far; customer understanding required a process.

What changes when nobody has to ask?

Two of the customer stories carrying Durbin’s byline turn the distribution argument into something visible. At phone-accessory brand Loopy Cases, the creative workflow involves two primary users, eight creative partners and more than 50 external users. Product photography arrives from multiple photographers and must serve designers, marketers and other collaborators.

The company’s files had been split between Box and Brandfolder. A migration had flattened a folder hierarchy the team depended on, making the loss of structure a practical obstacle. Inside Collage, the team organized folders by photographer and shoot number, alongside tagging and a brand portal. The details are wonderfully specific: the ordering reflects how those people actually recognize their work.

At E4, a two-person marketing team supports hundreds of field advisors. Its Collage portal lets those advisors browse and download content themselves. Weekly reports can be updated through version history while the shared link stays the same. That modest detail saves an old email from becoming a dead end. Durbin’s larger argument becomes easier to grasp when expressed as a link that still works.

These workflows show the kind of problem that occupies his attention: the distance between a small managing team and a much larger audience. A system earns its place when that distance stops producing a queue.

The move is a chance to repair the furniture

Durbin also treats migration as an opportunity to change the material going into a new system. In one customer migration he described publicly, Collage touched 99% of the files. The changes included normalized tags on 98.4% of assets, standardized filenames on 70.4%, remapped storage locations on 70.2%, and enriched or added custom fields on 42.8%.

Those figures describe one migration. They are interesting because they make the labor visible. Moving files sounds like transport. Cleaning up names, tags and structure requires decisions about what the organization means and how its people work. A new address for the same confusion is a rather expensive change of scenery.

His audit approach combines signals in the existing library with conversations about the customer’s workflows and, when available, supplementary business data. He has also written about making this structural intelligence continuous. The aspiration is a library that remains useful as an organization changes, rather than one that receives an occasional heroic spring cleaning.

The courage to remove a toggle

Durbin’s most revealing product opinions concern subtraction. In a LinkedIn post about removing features, he argued that settings and edge cases accumulate into friction. The ability to build faster makes restraint more necessary. That is an awkward position for any software business: visible additions are easy to announce; the decision to ask less of a user can be harder to put in a release note.

“Strong product teams don’t just ship. They subtract.”Ross Durbin

He also describes a bias toward action, influenced by advice from a former manager about moving quickly and correcting mistakes. Taken together, the two positions suggest a practical tension: act promptly, then be willing to remove what gets in the way. His public argument for simplicity includes work done after the first decision.

By August 2026, his writing had widened to the connections between software tools. He described Collage dropping its separate content-management system and spending less time inside its customer-management interface, using reachable data to support other workflows. He acknowledged the tension of criticizing subscription software while selling it himself. His test was becoming whether other systems could use what a tool held.

That brings the story back to the folder. Durbin began with brand files that people struggled to reach. His newer questions concern information that other software struggles to reach. The destination has expanded, but the irritation remains recognizable. Somewhere, someone is waiting for something that already exists. His business depends on making the wait unnecessary.