Chef has tapped Brian Goldfarb, who has held prominent marketing roles inside several notable enterprise tech companies, as its newest chief marketing officer, the company plans to announce later on Tuesday.
Goldfarb comes to Chef from Splunk, where he was also CMO for the public San Francisco-based monitoring and data analysis company. Prior to that, he ran marketing for Salesforce’s App Cloud product in San Francisco, and will be familiar to the Seattle area after more than ten years in enterprise and cloud marketing inside Google and Microsoft.
“A big part of my focus was how to get back to developer-focused technology,” Goldfarb said in an interview with GeekWire, explaining why he took the gig. “Chef is incredibly well-positioned to drive and support” companies that are modernizing their tech infrastructure with modern DevOps products, he said.
Goldfarb seems like the final new face after a few years of transition at Chef, during which it has welcomed new sales and product leaders as part of its push to focus on building tools for application developers, as opposed to the infrastructure operators it courted with its early products. When announcing the departure of Chef co-founder and CTO Adam Jacob last month, CEO Barry Crist said the company saw “record revenue” in the fourth quarter of 2018.
While Goldfarb said Chef will still be focused on developers and engineers, it’s also increasingly targeting higher-level business executives at companies that are starting to fall behind their peers when it comes to technology. This is enterprise software’s traditional hunting ground, and Goldfarb sees his role as “bridging” the company’s marketing across those two groups.
“(Technical business executives) care very little about the hammer that you choose to use so long as that hammer helps them meet their needs of their business: move faster, change, deal with something that’s happening in a more effective way,” Goldfarb said. This means Chef’s use of the hackeneyed enterprise tech marketing term “digital transformation” is probably about to accelerate.
