Keith McAleer
Marketing & Growth Leader for AI and Knowledge Work
San Francisco, CA · mcaleerkj@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/keithmcaleer · keithmcaleer.com
Marketing and growth leader with 15 years of experience building brands, demand-generation systems, digital products and narratives for complex technical work, including 11 years as Chief Marketing Officer of UC Berkeley's Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology. I pair senior marketing leadership with hands-on AI product work: I turn emerging technology into clear positioning and campaigns, drive measurable adoption and revenue, align teams without direct authority, and personally ship content, digital experiences and AI systems.
Core strengths
- GTM strategy & integrated marketing
- Product positioning & messaging
- Full-funnel acquisition & activation
- Narrative & editorial strategy
- Cross-functional influence
- AI adoption & agentic workflows
- CRM, lifecycle, analytics & automation
- Hands-on content & digital execution
Experience
Chief Marketing Officer
UC Berkeley Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (SCET) · Berkeley, CA
Senior marketing leader for Berkeley's innovation center in the College of Engineering, serving students, faculty, founders, executives, industry partners and a global academic network.
- Own end-to-end marketing across distinct audiences, from positioning and audience strategy through acquisition, content, events, CRM, conversion and measurement.
- Drive $1M+ in annual revenue through demand-generation systems for executive education and SCET Design Lab; achieved 5–10x ROAS across Google, Meta and LinkedIn paid acquisition.
- Own SCET's global brand and narrative across a federated portfolio of programs, labs, faculty initiatives and industry-facing offerings, aligning faculty, engineering, legal, communications and executive leadership.
- Created and grew program brands including Berkeley BEGIN, SCET Design Lab and UC Berkeley Engineering Professional Education within the UC Berkeley master brand; led four major website redesigns and produced or oversaw 150+ strategic articles.
- Architected and built the BEGIN Discovery Portal, a structured gateway to 50+ Berkeley innovation resources, using taxonomy and metadata so content supports both human discovery and AI-guided experiences.
- Built UC Berkeley's first AI-guided entrepreneurship resource chatbot and architected CRM and analytics infrastructure in HubSpot and GA4; delivered 15+ digital platform and content-system projects.
- Developing an AI-enabled marketing operating system that makes it easier for faculty, staff and students to contribute stories and campaign inputs through forms and AI-assisted workflows, increasing the supply and reach of community content.
- Built and led Growth, Communications and Design Labs of 10–15 staff, students and consultants; own an approximately $700K annual budget while staying hands-on in strategy, writing, design, analytics and product development.
Communications & Strategy Lead
UC Berkeley Industrial Engineering & Operations Research (IEOR) · Berkeley, CA
- Translated advanced engineering and operations research into clear narratives for students, faculty, industry partners and donors, working directly with tenured faculty.
Executive Director
Tree Davis · Davis, CA
- Led marketing, fundraising, partnerships and public storytelling for a nonprofit, reporting to a board of directors; raised $500K+ in grants and sponsorships.
- Delivered 100+ sustainability initiatives with municipalities, utilities, community organizations and private partners.
AI & product builds
Designed, directed and shipped 10+ substantial applications with AI coding agents, combining product strategy, UX, software development, automation and AI-system design.
Hey Neko · Voice-first desktop AI assistant and orchestrator
- Shipped a desktop AI agent with natural voice, tool use, persistent memory, model-agnostic routing, MCP support and code-enforced safety controls; 500+ automated tests across ~22K lines of Python.
- Designed it as a practical knowledge-work collaborator that keeps separate work and personal contexts and hands off coding tasks to specialized agents in the background.
Venti · Agentic marketing workspace
- Building a multi-agent marketing workspace with 50+ tools spanning brand, campaign, lead, form and page workflows; represents brand systems as structured data and writes lead intelligence back to HubSpot.
StartupOS · Evidence-graded venture decisions
- Built a venture decision system where hypotheses, experiments and decisions are graded on a typed evidence ladder and the AI assistant returns structured proposals rather than ungoverned free text; 136 automated tests.
Talks
The Innovation Collider
Research-backed framework for marketing in the AI era: AI-mediated buyer research, human point of view, website as source of truth, narrow ICPs and realistic adoption of AI agents.
Startup Marketing in the AI Era
Practical frameworks for founders on positioning, customer-centered narrative, minimum viable brand and when marketing should scale with evidence of product-market fit.
Education & recognition
- B.A., Political Science & Sociology, University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire
- Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Award, UC Berkeley, 2022