Employee Spotlight: Meet Iain Goodridge – Senior Director of Marketing, Federal

What’s your role? 

My role at Spire has certainly evolved over the past five years. I was hired as the first product marketer to help build the marketing engine and product roadmap for the maritime team, Spire’s first commercial business unit. As the company has grown, I’ve advised and counseled the marketing initiatives across all the teams as they grew – and due to my tenure some refer to me as the Swiss Army Knife (which I appreciate!) of Spire marketing. In late 2020, it was clear that with the federal team’s growth, they needed a full-time marketing director. I had been involved with supporting the federal team in different capacities since that team was one person, so It made sense to move to the team full time and support that growth potential.

Describe your journey to Spire.

In late 2017, I received a phone call from the Spire CFO at that time. He shared Spire’s aspirations and how they were at an inflection point and needed help with their product marketing. I had been working at Jive Software leading its innovation product marketing team, and after five years at Jive where I worked through an IPO and acquisition, I was looking for my next category creating firm! That call from Spire was a catalyst to dig into the new space industry, and I wanted to be part of it!

What Spire value do you relate to the most? 

Over the past five years, I have found times when I relate to all of Spire’s values. If I were to choose just one, it would be Unbounded. I enjoy presenting solutions and ideas to any challenge I am involved in. At its core, marketing is big on problem solving. I enjoy digging in on how things work and considering new ways we can bring our products to market and share our message.

What keeps you busy outside of work? 

Outside of spending time with my wife and three kids (ages 2 to 11), I have a passion for keeping old English cars – Land Rovers, Jaguars, Mini Coopers, you name it – on the road! I like to pretend I am on an episode of Top Gear. I also enjoy spending time outdoors (randomly, I am a certified Wilderness Paramedic) and have fond memories hiking for weeks in Alaska, Georgia, Montana, Idaho before having kids. Recently, we got to experience the beautiful scenery of the nearby Appalachian Mountains with my family.

The global nature of Spire requires flexibility and time management. How do you navigate working with colleagues around the globe? 

Over the past 10 years of my career, I have been located right in the middle of the European and Pacific Coast time zones. Being in this location, I’ve had my fair share of 3:00 am investor demos and 10:00 pm sales calls.

One thing I would like to emphasize is that if you end up having 3 am’s or 10 pm’s, you should give yourself permission to take some time off here and there. Having three kids, I understand the importance of home time and will choose to take them out for ice cream or to the park during breaks in the day as a little ‘reward’ for driving back to the office at 2 am.

What is a project that you have worked on that makes you particularly proud?

When I joined Spire, it was very clear that to support the sales cycles we needed to find a way to visualize our data for demos and use cases. I developed our relationship with Esri as a solution for this problem. I now continue to support and maintain Spire’s data in the GIS world by using Esri. Through this work, we are now considered Esri’s go-to resource for ship tracking, and most recently, weather forecasting. After more than four years, it has legit revenue attached to it!