Drift appoints new CEO, David Cancel to become executive chairman

B2B conversational marketing platform Drift has announced that Scott Ernst will become CEO while co-founder David Cancel will take on the role of executive chairman. Co-founder Elias Torres will continue in the CTO role. Cancel and Torres are a rare example of Latinx co-founders in the martech space.

Ernst spent over five years at market research and digital marketing company Macromill, leading it through a successful IPO, and was most recently CEO at social video measurement company Tubular Labs.

Cancel, who has led Drift for more than seven years, had previously become Chief Product Officer at HubSpot when his CX optimization company Performable was acquired. He was also the founder of Ghostery. Under his leadership, Drift reached a greater than $1 billion valuation, and built a global base of over 5,000 customers.

Why we care. Drift is unquestionably a success story and Cancel has been a very familiar figure as leader, not least on-stage at the Drift Hypergrowth events. We’ll be watching to see the direction Ernst takes the platform.

“I’m excited to continue to invest my time in Drift in this new capacity and role, while seeing the incredible journey Scott will lead Drift on as the company continues to mature,” said Cancel in a release.

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space.

He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020.

Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.

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