The Marketing Engineer - Josh Blyskal (Special Projects at Profound)

Josh Blyskal (Special Projects at Profound) takes the stage to unpack the rapid growth of Profound and discuss how AI is radically shifting the marketing landscape. From parallels between historical engineering booms and today's AI-driven evolution, this candid presentation explores what it takes to build systems in the AI era. Key Timestamps: 0:04 – Moving from a 1,000 sq ft office in Union Square to today's massive stage 00:40 – The structural parallels of 1988: Jim Simons and the finance engineering layer 01:14 – The data engineering layer: Maxim Beauchemin and the rise of Airbnb 01:47 – The go-to-market engineering layer: Varun Anand and the $5B journey behind Clay 03:08 – Shattering constraints: Why traditional automation hit a ceiling and how AI agents broke it 03:32 – The rise of the Marketing Engineer and inventing entirely new agent-driven workflows 03:49 – Building an autonomous competitive monitoring agent from scratch 05:48 – Spotlighting early pioneers: Austin McLeod, Colin Bedford, Nick Lafferty, and Rick Nash 07:09 – Real-world validation: Why growth marketing teams at companies like Ramp are actively hiring agentic operators 07:38 – Introducing Profound University: The first dedicated, 6+ hour curriculum and certification for Marketing Engineers 08:24 – The Profound Partner Program: Scale your own practice and service the global brand demand for AI expertise 09:08 – A vision for marketing moving forward: Shifting from how marketers see to how marketers do Hosted by Profound.