At Marigold Engage by Sailthru, we’ve assembled an impossibly dedicated crew of people who go above and beyond to make sure our product and services are top notch. But more than the skill and expertise each person demonstrates at their job, what makes our office special is each individual’s unique passions outside the workplace. Our implementation engineer is a world class ballroom dancer, I often grab lunch with the office sales director/yogi, and our office manager reminds us of the beauty in and around our space with his gorgeous photography. So, who are these people? We’re proud to introduce you to the members of our fast growing team weekly, starting with:

A born and bred Tarheel, Aubrey is originally from Charlotte, NC. He attended the University of North Carolina, and has a dislike for Duke athletics that borders on socially unacceptable. Aubrey graduated with a degree in Radio Journalism with a focus in radio documentary. It’s his voice you hear when you dial into our support line. This is Aubrey’s third startup.

A little known fact about me is…I got my first job out of school because the company mistook be for a girl.
The best part of my job is…working with clients to help them leverage our products and services in ways that enhance their business. That, and the Sailthru-sponsored trivia nights.
The worst job experience I’ve ever had is…I was once a back room ‘wrapper-boy’ at Williams Sonoma in high school. Having never wrapped a gift in my entire life, I didn’t last long at this position.
In 5 years I want to be…getting my own startup off the ground!

Can you tell us more about radio documentary work? What is that, exactly?

Yeah, so I went to school for radio documentary work. Have you’ve ever heard of “This American Life” with Ira Glass? That’s what I wanted to do. I basically wanted to be Ira Glass. But I got out of school and quickly realized that it was a fairly niche market… I was struggling in New York, so I got into PR, and have been doing startup stuff ever since.

You mentioned that you were involved with two startups prior to Marigold Engage by Sailthru, can you talk about them a little bit?

Yeah, so the first startup was actually an art co-op that I created with some friends in 2008. When the economy went in the tank, we decided to start our own art gallery co-op, called Republic Worldwide. It’s still actually out there, and doing quite well. I’m not a part of it any more but it was a really great experience. They were the artists and I was the business side of it. That was a lot of fun.

And then, the last couple of years I worked for a social media analytics company called General Sentiment, they do natural language processing – social media semantic analysis, essentially. So they could take any kind of social media and determine whether the sentiment toward that company was positive or negative.

So you’ve been in the startup environment for a while now, what in particular keeps you in startups?

I love being in the startup atmosphere – you get to work with a lot of young people and it’s a lot of responsibility. I would never want to work for a company that had more than three or four hundred people. [In startups] you constantly get to be working on a variety of different things, you’re building something from the ground up. I really like being able to look a company website and think “I influenced the look and feel of that,” and what we do as a business.