About me
Every story has a beginning...
A long time ago, in a place not too far away, as I turned 12 years old, two important events happend:
- My school friends realized that there were three other Martins in the class, and therefore, decided to start calling me "Gonto".
- My uncle, a systems engineer, started showing me the magic of programming by teaching me one of the most hated programming languages of all time: Visual Basic 6.
At the age of 16, I had already programmed lots of different video games with Visual Basic 6 like Simon Says, Buraco, Truco, and Black Jack. I also joined a forum called Gamesario, and helped code parts of a game called Argentum Online, also with VB6.
When I reached the age of 18, not only did I start to grow a beard, but I also started studying Systems Engineering at UTN (National Technology University). College was only a few hours per day and I was bored afterwards. Since I knew how to code, I decided to join Globant, one of the biggest software consulting firms in Argentina. At that point, I was coding in C# and built apps for SourceForge and Electronic Arts among others.
After another year and a half, I decided to switch companies and started to work at Zauber (now called Flowics). It was a software boutique where I knew I could grow a lot and learn lots of different programming languages like Scala, Ruby, JavaScript, and others. In these three years, I became a professional software developer thanks to the help of great mentors like Mariano Cortesi. I ended up being a technical project leader, leading teams of up to 5 people.
After three more years, I felt that it was time to start giving back to the community which helped me learn so many different languages and frameworks. This is when I started doing freelancing and building my own Open Source projects. Looking back, this is the decision that started changing to course of my carrer, getting me nearer to marketing.
I built Restangular, Angular Wizard, Factory Pal, and Angularytics among other open source projects. Some of these projects are used nowadays by Fortune 500 companies around the world like weather.com, Disney and Reuters.
The most interesting part about this is how these projects got to be popular. Even though I didn't know it at that point in time, it was all due to Developer Marketing. I wrote tons of articles about Restangular and adjacent technologies (like AngularJS and REST APIs) in my blog, distributed these blog posts to news aggregators (like Hacker News and Reddit) and also sent them to influential people to review and share. I also actively searched and answered questions on both Stackoverflow and Quora related to these projects, and started talking and engaging with other open source developers to bounce ideas off of.
All of these led me to the AngularJS Mountain View meetup, where I did the first talk of my life. As you can see from the video below, I was so nervous that I sounded like a robot.
Thankfully, being such a bad speaker on that first meetup didn't bring me down. I started applying to CFPs and got accepted to more than 20 different conferences around the world. You can see a few of the videos from those conferences below.
Giving a talk at jQuerySF about the differences between Angular 1 and 2
This new things that have been happening in my life are what brought me to Auth0. I joined Auth0 as the 6th employee. I was a Developer Evangelist, which is a pretty new role that embraces the mix of Marketing and Development. My job included giving talks at different conferences around front end technologies, security, and APIs (among other things), as well as writing blog posts and documentation for the product itself. Last but not least, I was in charge of creating the SDKs for all the different frameworks and languages Auth0 supports. Pretty fun job, right?
The more I worked as a Developer Evangelist, the more I realized that I liked marketing. I eventually became the SVP of Marketing, having more than 80 people on my team. As explained in the home page, thanks to my background, I have a really new approach to marketing Anything can be tried, but it must be treated as an experiment, which must have a hypothesis, a goal and some metric to measure sucess. My main slogan at Auth0 is:
“It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. You have an idea and a way to measure it? Just try it out!”
After running the marketing team at Auth0 for 7 years and helping the company grow its ARR from $0 to 9 figures, Okta decided to acquire it for 6.5B. After giving it a lot of thought, I made the call to leave Auth0 and focus full time on helping other companies achieve the same level of growth. I became a General Partner and B2B SaaS Advisor at Hypergrowth Partners with Guillaume "𝑮" Cabane. Hypergrowth Partners helps B2B startups grow faster in exchange for equity. We help startups with creative GTM, specifically focused on Product-Led Growth, ABM Outbound, and Automated outbound. We are a team of senior (VP, SVP) B2B marketers with significant experience at high-growth startups (Auth0, Zapier, Segment, Atlassian, G2). We've helped companies like Vercel, Ramp, Retool, Honeycomb, and Maze among others
We have arrived at the present. Now it's time to shape the future together. If you want to bounce an idea off me, talk about a project, or just want to grab a beer, contact me! You can be part of my story!