first-party-data
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Alexi Hatch Is Racing the Half-Life of Customer Intent
The design-trained CMO of Acoustic has built a career around one stubborn idea: marketing gets better when evidence travels faster than opinion.
Grace Bacon Is Teaching AI to Remember the Customer
After a career spanning Quartz, Showpad, and BlueConic, Grace Bacon has arrived at a useful conviction: faster marketing means little if the machine has forgotten the person.
Alex Song
He spent nine years reading markets for Goldman and Bill Ackman. Now he is handing small brands the data science that used to belong only to the giants.
David Dokes
David Dokes is the co-founder and CEO of Polar Analytics, a first-party data and business intelligence platform built for Shopify and direct-to-consumer brands. Before Polar, he led growth at car-sharing marketplace Turo, where he ran a roughly $20M annual marketing budget. He teamed up with former Airbnb data scientist Charbel Seif in 2020 to give smaller retailers the kind of enterprise-grade data infrastructure that big companies take for granted, unifying scattered marketing, sales, and inventory data into one dashboard that installs in days rather than months. Under his leadership Polar has raised roughly $28.5M and now serves several thousand merchants across dozens of countries.
Vaidhy Murti
Vaidhy Murti is the founder and CEO of WIT, a New York fan-engagement and consumer-data platform that runs sponsored contests, polls, and instant-win games for teams across the NFL, NHL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS, and NCAA. A Princeton computer-science grad, he built his first company, the college dating app Friendsy, out of his dorm room and became the youngest founder backed by Lerer Hippeau at 21. WIT took four years and three pivots to turn profitable, and now powers digital activations for nearly 100 venues, leagues, and Fortune 1000 brands.
Paulo Martins
Paulo Martins is the Brazilian-born founder and CEO of Arena (arena.im), a San Francisco-based AI-powered community engagement platform that lets brands embed live chat, live blogs, and audience interaction tools directly on their own websites with a single line of code. After stints at NASA, Ubisoft, and Hulu — where he helped grow the streaming company from 100K to 7 million paying subscribers — Martins founded Arena in 2017 with a clear thesis: businesses should own their audience, not rent it from social platforms. By 2022, Arena had grown to 25,000 customers across 150 countries and closed a $13.6M Series A led by CRV, with backing from heavyweights like David Sacks, Des Traynor, and Olivier Pomel.
Austin Harrison
Austin Harrison is the co-founder and CEO of Northbeam, a San Francisco-based marketing intelligence platform that uses first-party data and machine learning to give e-commerce and D2C brands an accurate picture of which ads are actually driving revenue. Before pivoting to martech, Harrison built a parallel career in digital entertainment — co-founding an animation company that worked with Hasbro, Disney, and NBC Universal, and earlier running MediaTrip, an online animation channel that earned an Entertainment Weekly Top 10 Internet Phenomenon ranking. At Northbeam, he has led the company to track over $130 billion in ad-attributed revenue across 800+ brands, raised $40 million in total funding, and launched industry-first attribution models developed in partnership with Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat.
Taoufik Jamali
Taoufik Jamali is a Moroccan-born serial entrepreneur and CEO of Journify, an AI-powered composable Customer Data Platform that pushes ad conversion match rates from ~42% to 70-90% through privacy-first, server-side data activation. With two successful startup exits under his belt - Netclub (sold to Match.com in 2007) and Unyk (acquired by Viadeo in 2009) - and stints as VP of Growth at Shopkick and VP of Product/PLG at Smartsheet, Jamali founded Journify in 2023 and grew it to $1M ARR within nine months, raised $4M in 2025, and doubled the company valuation in under six months as he targets the broken attribution problem plaguing e-commerce advertisers globally.