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Rahul

Deshmukh

VP Marketing

Druva

Rahul Deshmukh builds and scales marketing engines that fuel growth for B2B SaaS companies, taking brands from category creation through to public markets. He has played a role in four pre-IPO to IPO journeys, including Splunk, Cloudflare, Cloudera, and Marqeta, helping each marketing organization grow from an early stage startup into a global business generating over $500M in ARR. Across his career, Rahul has led marketing through four IPOs, scaling ARR from $17M to more than $500M, and built integrated go to market motions combining product led and sales led growth that generated over $150M in pipeline. He has repositioned technical brands to reach Gartner "Leader" status, including Cloudflare, Exabeam, and Druva, and brings a deep understanding of AI architectures, having led the launch of multiple AI products within the Dru product family. Rahul is known for building and mentoring GenAI forward global marketing teams, and has served as an AI Transformation Owner for marketing organizations, driving the adoption of AI to scale and improve efficiency across the function, leading by example throughout.

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08 October 2025 12:30 - 13:15

Panel | Bringing creativity back to marketing

Sameness has become the default setting of modern marketing. As content grows infinite and every brand gains access to the same channels, formats, and AI tools, creativity, once marketing's most obvious differentiator, keeps getting engineered out of the process in favour of safe, forgettable work that tests well but says nothing. Attendees will leave with a clearer diagnosis of where their own organisation is engineering the risk out of its marketing, practical arguments for defending bolder creative work internally, and examples of brands using distinctiveness as a genuine growth lever rather than a nice-to-have. Key takeaways: - Why safe, forgettable marketing is a bigger risk than bold marketing in a saturated market - How internal approval processes and risk tolerance quietly kill creativity - Building a culture and workflow that protects space for original work - Arguments for defending creative risk in front of a board that rewards safety - Real examples of distinctiveness working as a growth lever, not just a brand exercise