Ep24 Alan Gold—Sales, Marketing, and AI: How to Survive, Scale, and Avoid Stagnation

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Today's guest in Sky Lounge is Alan Gold. Hi Allen, hello Todd, great to be here. Great to see you again. Hey Allan, who are you and what are you working on?

Well, most of it I can't talk about or I'd have to shoot you, but the part that I can talk about is having spent the last 30 plus years in marketing and sales through technology primarily but other companies as well. I've been in all sorts of technologies that are things that we do every day. I was on a launch team for Wi-Fi technology. If you look at the back of your driver's license you'll see a really badly looking barcode. I work with that, it's called PDF417, and I've been involved in speech recognition from its earliest days all the way up into different kinds of AI informed management tools. So it's been an interesting journey. I've been in startup companies, I've been on both sides of mergers and acquisitions, have taken companies private, have taken companies public, and about eight years ago I decided to step out of the M&A world and become a consultant on my own with a number of different long-term clients, everything from pharma to social services, and joined our company TechCXO about a year and a half ago for a number of really positive reasons to have access to lots of experts where I may need some to bring on an account and also to have a peer group to share ideas and get ideas from. That's where I am now.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, you said M&A and you piqued my interest there. I'm about to go to a conference next week, M&A South, so everybody's going to be talking about M&A. You know, I at the end of the year talk to lots of funds and you get the updates from all these companies. Everything, boy it sure feels like we're at an inflection point in the market. I'm not sure if that's good or bad with mergers and acquisitions and exits and all that kind of stuff. You know, I got a lot of information from some of these folks in our adventure world. Hey, we sure do need some healthy exits to free up some of this cash to get the engine going again. Everything's cyclical. What are you seeing out there in the world as far as M&A and exits and that kind of thing in general?

Well, it's a bit of a mix and as you implied, it's frankly an uncertain time. I mean, you know, whenever a new administration comes in of any sort, it is always a time for a little bit of reflection and waiting for the market to settle. I noticed recently the market after having been on an upswing has taken a step back into it's unclear what the cost of money is going to be in this next year and it's also unclear what the appetite is for acquisition of goods and services, you know, whether that's in the B2B realm or in the consumer realm. So I think where there are going to be successful transitions or exits, it's going to have to be around things that are particularly compelling, that feel not necessarily a basic need but one that does basic things better or creates a new category of functionality that gives either a company or individuals an opportunity to leapfrog the way they're doing things now. And so I think uncertainty is the phrase I would use, though there are certainly opportunities out there.