Dave Birckhead is a marketing-technology and growth-systems leader with over twenty years of experience at the intersection of engineering, product, and 📝go-to-market, now at OpenAI. He served as the first Global Head of Marketing Technology at Spotify for six and a half years, building and scaling the MarTech stack across Spotify's three-sided marketplace of consumers, artists, and advertisers. He then joined ezCater, a corporate-catering company valued over $1B, as Director of Marketing Technology and Operations, leading a rebuild of its growth-stage data and systems foundation. In September 2025 he stepped away for what he called an AI sabbatical, building AI-native GTM systems full-time and writing publicly through his Substack, Full-Stack Growth. He holds master's and bachelor's degrees from the University of Virginia.
At Spotify, Dave's team solved a user-messaging problem by building machine-learning models that optimized message volume at the individual-user level rather than applying blanket cutoffs, steadily lowering unsubscribe rates, and automated global creative production from a three-to-four-month manual process down to days. During his sabbatical he rebuilt that creative workflow as a prototype using Claude Code and Figma's MCP server, and built over 15 prototypes plus two production-grade AI applications — including a cross-functional system where marketing, sales, and CS agents share memory and context. A central lesson: an AI prototype can reach 90% in a day, but the final 10% — evals, monitoring, tracing, and security — is far harder and explains the gap between a working demo and a shippable system. He predicts marketing, rev, and CS tech will converge under unified leadership, and that companies must build dedicated IC career tracks for GTM engineers.
I had Dave on after his jump from scaling MarTech at Spotify and ezCater into a GTM AI sabbatical — the takeaway I kept was the 90-to-100 problem: the last 10% of an AI system is where the real work lives.