About Colin Gillingham

I grew up in Wisconsin and went to Elon University in North Carolina. I graduated into the 2008 recession and, by way of a Craigslist post, ended up at Tesla as one of the first couple hundred employees. The company was growing faster than anyone could keep up with, and I was responsible for scaling GTM operations on Salesforce across that whole run. That’s where I learned how to build systems that don’t fall apart when everything around them is changing.

After about five and a half years at Tesla I moved to London in 2013 and learned to code at General Assembly. I wanted to understand how the things I was managing actually worked under the hood. In 2014 I joined ProLeads, a 500 Startups company, as a full-stack developer. Then I became Head of Product at WIREWAX, a computer vision company (now part of Vimeo), reporting to the CEO, shipping enterprise projects for Disney and Sony and managing a team of engineers. That’s where I got technical enough to actually build things, not just have opinions about them.

From London I moved to Lisbon with my now-wife, and spent three years doing freelance engineering and advising early-stage startups, helping them sort out their technical architecture and go-to-market at the same time.

Then we moved to San Francisco together, where I joined Mapbox and led GTM engineering, operations and growth. I reported directly to the CEO and spent two years rebuilding how the company acquired and converted users. From there, New York, where our daughter was born in 2023.

In New York I ran marketing and operations at Delphi Digital, and moved the whole customer stack onto HubSpot in three months. On the side I built LeadShogun, an AI tool that turned anonymous website traffic into personal outreach. It got me recruited to Clearbit, where I joined as Head of Growth & Analytics in October 2023. HubSpot acquired Clearbit, and in January 2024 I officially became part of HubSpot.

At HubSpot I was a Group PM leading the Automation Platform, and I led Agent Hub, the product that lets customers put agents to work on front-office and back-office work, from private beta to general availability. It’s the same thing I now do as a consultant, just from the product side. My whole career has been some version of this: figure out how work actually flows through a company, then make it faster. First it was Salesforce and ops. Then code and product. Now it’s AI.

Having worked across sales, marketing, ops, product and engineering means I can take something from idea to shipped product on my own: the engineering, the marketing, all of it. More than a dozen AI products since 2023, built solo, many with real users.

I build these because AI moves too fast to understand from the sideline. Every few months a new model or platform opens up things that weren’t possible before. Shipping real products is the only way I’ve found to separate what actually works from what just sounds good in a demo. And it’s what gives me conviction about where business processes and roles are actually going.