About Colin Gillingham

I grew up in Wisconsin and went to Elon University in North Carolina. I graduated into the 2008 recession and somehow 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 five years at Tesla I moved to London and taught myself to code. I wanted to understand how the things I was managing actually worked under the hood. I ended up as both a developer and a product manager at WIREWAX, a computer vision company (now part of Vimeo), 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. We had our daughter there, and I spent a couple of years doing engineering freelance work and consulting for early-stage startups — helping them sort out their technical architecture and go-to-market at the same time.

Then back to San Francisco, where I joined Mapbox and helped scale the digital GTM team and operations. I reported directly to the CEO and spent two years rebuilding how the company acquired and converted users. From there, New York.

For the last 2+ years I've been at HubSpot as a Group PM leading the Automation Platform — the product that lets customers wire up agents to handle front-office and back-office work. It's basically 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. Five AI products in the last two years, all solo, all 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.