The CMO Who Runs Toward the Fire: Marc Blackmer on Messy Startups and Honest Leadership

The CMO Who Runs Toward the Fire: Marc Blackmer on Messy Startups and Honest Leadership

From Cisco to chaos (by choice), Marc Blackmer, CMO at Corero Network Security, joins us to unpack the real talk no one warns you about when you take the top marketing job.

In this episode, Gianna and Charles sit down with Marc to unpack the real, raw, and hilarious side of marketing leadership. From walking away from Cisco to jumping back into the startup chaos, Marc shares with us why he needs a mess to clean up, how he builds teams that balance his creative chaos, and why telling the truth in interviews matters more than boasting about perks.

We discuss impostor syndrome, hiring to your weaknesses, and how ChatGPT became Marc’s idea dumping ground so he doesn’t drive his team crazy. And yes, there’s even a game that ends in a heartfelt tribute to Dave Grohl.

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Fake Student Fraud in Community Colleges

Reporting on the rise of fake students enrolling in community college courses:
The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.
The article talks about the rise of this type of fraud, the difficulty of detecting it, and how it upends quite a bit of the class structure and learning community…

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