Austin Hay
Co-Founder, Clarify. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderoperatorexecutiveauthorLinkedIn ↗austinhay.com ↗
Austin Hay is a MarTech operator and educator known for creating the Mastering Marketing Technology program at Reforge and authoring The Growth Stack Mafia newsletter. He previously served as Head of Marketing Technology at Ramp and held growth leadership roles at Runway, mParticle, and Branch Metrics before co-founding Clarify.
1shows
1appearances
25statements
3resolved
2supported
1contradicted
67%fully supported
Everything Austin Hay said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Hay: Most startups should avoid decentralized operations models
“As you add more operational people, it just creates more systems, and so, like, unless you're a massive company where you need that type of scale, I think, like, most startups, like, should avoid that decentralized model.”
Hay: Snowplow is the only CDP allowing custom schema control
“Most third party B to C tools don't allow you to control the schema. There's only one CDP I know that does that. That's Snowplow. The rest are, there's a user object and an event object. So you can either stuff data as a user property onto the user object, or …”
Hay: Most businesses are not ready for Marketing Mix Modeling
“Most of the time businesses are not ready for MMM. They actually just need MTA, and they need better probabilistic modeling.”
Hay: Never join companies hiding financials from director-level hires
“One of the red flags whenever I'm approaching a company to work for them is I'll ask for their company financials and like a company that's not willing to divulge their financials to like a director level or above person. I don't want to do business with, beca…”
Hay: Systems thinkers should delay decisions as long as possible
“And one of his tactics is this concept of thinking gray, which is actually to not decide for as long as you possibly can before you have to decide. And it's really challenging because it involves this little thing called patience, which I do not have a lot of …”
Hay reveals the ideal golden tech stack for B2C marketing
“If I was a B to C business, I'd buy Amplitude for my CDP, I'd buy customer IO, and maybe I'd upgrade to Braze in the future. I'd put everything in Snowflake. I'd buy high touch to reverse ETL, that data out to my ad networks. For attribution, probably AppSlyer…”
Austin Hay: Branch is better for web-only attribution
“If it's a web only business, probably use branch because branch is better for web.”
Hay: B2B companies should use Customer.io and Braze over HubSpot
“You know, a lot of people use HubSpot. I would try to go away with customer IO as long as I could, and then I'd move to Braze afterwards.”
Hay: MarTech operates as product management for internal and external platforms
“I think really the way to think about marketing technology is it's a product manager whose specific role and focus is the system or the third party or first party platform, because, you know, marketing technology can mean a collection of third party tools, whi…”
Hay: Startups need dedicated systems owners at 100 to 150 employees
“Usually around, I would call it, like, a hundred to a 150 people is the critical mass where you can't just have a village approach to systems and tools.”
Hay: High-velocity MarTech means buying 90% of tools and building 10%
“That's how you actually have a lot of velocity, is thinking about not just build versus buy, it's build and buy now. So you buy the tool to get 90% of the way there, and then you build the cool thing on top with the other 10%.”
Hay: Top MarTech leaders require recent hands-on operating experience
“You have to be an IC in that you are the most senior technical expert on all first party and third party systems. So you have to know really well how third party tools work, and you don't know that without doing the work yourself. So I do find that like some o…”
Hay: Cross-functional influence matters more than team size when hiring MarTech
“So what I would say is like more important to look for than how many people has this person managed is how well can they manage upward, laterally, and downward?”
Austin Hay: MarTech is engineering-based while MarOps is semi-technical operations
“Marketing technology has tech in it, so it's usually an engineer or somebody with an engineering background doing that function. Marketing operations is usually not always technical. It's maybe a systems analyst or a business analyst, you know, could be somebo…”
Hay: Advanced engineering teams using Snowflake and dbt should adopt reverse ETL
“If you are an advanced engineering Culture, and you are cutting edge, and you're going to do a bunch of modeling in dbt, and you already have Snowflake, you should move towards a model of using a reverse ETL.”
Hay: Companies should design data tracking systems for multi-touch attribution from day one
“And so in my mind, the best practice that everybody should stand up from day one is to basically design the system for MTA, and then use whatever makes sense as you grow.”
Hay: Breaking into MarTech requires six months of coding, not a CS degree
“You don't have to go get a software engineering degree. You can teach yourself. I am self-taught. You can take a coding academy online. I think you get enough knowledge through being able to do web programming or some type of back-end programming So I would sa…”
Hay: Twitter ruins careers because people cannot keep quiet
“I think Twitter, like, ruins people's careers. I've already seen multiple careers ruined by Twitter. Some people just don't know how to shut their mouth, so, like, I just, I'm not on Twitter.”
Ramp splits revenue operations into business and marketing technology
“At ramp, we're big enough and we're a B to B company, but we have a B to C top of funnel where we try to acquire users and get them to fill out our application to get a credit card. We have like a distinct revenue operations team that's broken into business te…”
Ramp optimizes ad campaigns on bottom-funnel opportunity values via synthetic events
“And actually one of the coolest and most fun projects that we worked on early when I joined ramp is we were optimizing. We're trying to get top of funnel data all the way down to the bottom of the funnel and tie it with opportunity data. So we could send that …”
Hay: Warehouse ownership costs dropped around 2020, reducing data team size needs
“The thing about it, though, that I think really changed around 2020 is that the cost of ownership of warehousing became much cheaper. And so, twenty-twenty-one, you start getting the place where, like, yeah, it actually makes a lot of sense and is really easy …”
Austin Hay: Deterministic mobile ad tracking via IDFAs is effectively dead
“From 20 10 to 20 20, we had the golden years of deterministic matching where, you know, it was very easy to run an ad and understand with precision who installed the app. Maybe you don't know their name, but you actually would know their IDFA and you could tie…”
Hay: Browser URL parameter stripping inflates organic web traffic counts
“Browsers now are stripping out those URLs we talked about. So you're just seeing a bigger and bigger percentage of people being counted as organic that actually came from a paid advertisement because when they got redirected to your website, they just, the bro…”
Hay: Asking candidates about recent hardship encourages vulnerability and calms them
“Tell me about the most difficult or challenging thing you've overcome in the last year in your life. It doesn't have to be work related. It can be personal. And I think it's like a great way to just like reset the atmosphere Make people dig a little bit deeper…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Austin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-Founder, Clarify | 1 | 25 | 67% 2/3 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |