083: Scott Ernst, Drift CEO

Boston Speaks Up

Guest Scott Ernst is an entrepreneur who’s been at the intersection of market research, commerce and technology for three decades. He was building startups on Newbury Street in Boston long before this recent wave of VCs and startups began moving into the Back Bay area. After stints at multiple startups in the 1990s, Ernst was a founding management team member of Compete in the 2000s and helped the company grow to a $100 million revenue business resulting in the 2008 acquisition by MIllward Brown Digital/WPP’s Kantar. In June 2022, he made headlines for his appointment as CEO of Boston-based Drift, a marketing technology trailblazer best known for single-handedly introducing conversational marketing to the market. Ernst joined his friend, company co-founder and long-time CEO, David Cancel, who stepped into the role of Executive Chairman. Ernst most recently served as CEO of Tubular Labs, a social video analytics company headquartered in San Francisco. Prior to that, he was the CEO of Macromill, a Tokyo-based global marketing research business, which he took through an IPO with an enterprise value of over $1 billion. In this episode, Ernst discusses the future of Drift, OG Boston tech, his time in Japan, taking a company from early stage to IPO, how San Francisco and Boston compare, the future of marketing and much more.