How Goldcast’s CEO Built an AI-Powered Video Marketing Platform That’s Reshaping B2B Events
Here's how a chance meeting between Harvard MBA students led to a groundbreaking platform helping teams turn video content into pipeline in hours instead of weeks.
Written by: Mehedi Hasan Shoab
Photography by: Elli Bock
Summary
- Evolved from virtual events to full AI-powered video platform, crossing $10M ARR with 50% higher quarterly sales
- Recording Studio launch changed everything, enabling HD content creation and AI editing that cuts turnaround time by 90%
- Building "YouTube agents" that autonomously manage channels, creating playlists and editing content without human intervention
- Closed 60+ enterprise clients in one year including Canva, OpenAI, and GitLab by solving multiple video pain points
- Values must be operationalized everywhere: Leadership lesson that company values can't be democratic—they must come from founders
Introduction
Back in 2023, we sat down with Palash Soni, co-founder and CEO of Goldcast, to discuss how his team was reshaping virtual events for B2B marketers.
Two years later, the story looks very different, with Goldcast scaling into a category-defining platform. We recently reconnected with Palash to hear how Goldcast has scaled, the key factors accelerating the company's growth in 2025, and where he sees the future of AI-powered video marketing heading.
What you’re about to read is that original article, followed by a fresh 2025 update on how Goldcast has scaled, innovated, and is shaping the future of AI-driven video content.
With the rise of remote work, finding ways to engage digitally has become crucial for businesses. For B2B marketers in particular, digital events are key for reaching prospects and customers globally. That need is what drove three Harvard MBA students to found Goldcast, a new-age digital events platform designed for B2B marketers.
Palash Soni is the CEO & co-founder of Goldcast alongside COO & co-founder Kishore Kothandaraman. They founded the company to empower B2B marketers to use events as a key go-to-market (GTM) activity by helping them host incredible experiences. Palash and Kishore, along with now 100+ teammates, are working together to revolutionize events that will help businesses drive revenue.
HubSpot for Startups spoke with Palash to learn about the origin of Goldcast, the challenges he faces as a CEO, and the advice he has for aspiring CEOs.
The Origin of Goldcast
Prior to founding Goldcast, Palash and Kishore met at a cohort networking event in India, facilitated by Harvard Business School (HBS). The two hit it off from the start and began collaborating immediately. Palash said he was instantly impressed by Kishore’s “hustling” and he could tell he was the kind of guy that “gets into doors and opens those doors.”
“I think one thing that stands out and makes Kishore a great co-founder and a great entrepreneur is that he was just transitioning out of a job and wanted to learn about tech startups—so he messaged me after seeing that I was building a startup and asked about internships.”
Kishore is by inclination, not a people manager and more of a strategic thinker, so the two determined that he would be best suited for the role of COO, while Palash’s strengths lie more with people and culture—making him the better choice for CEO. They were both very aligned on that decision and consistently worked well together with different ideas and projects, so they decided to start exploring business ideas.
Palash used to sell to businesses and was familiar with sales and marketing platforms like HubSpot. Since he built similar products, he knew how they fit into the puzzle, how hard it was to prove the ROI of events, and the challenge marketers faced orchestrating them. When their other ideas didn’t pan out, they started thinking about how it would be cool to build a CRM for events and connect with CRM tools to help make events more measurable, and they saw digital events as an upcoming venture.
“With digital content, events could go from being one-off to a more repeatable, adaptable, and measurable marketing activity where you can obtain a lot of insights. You can also orchestrate a full go-to-market activity around the event and have touchpoints with audiences through digital events—which is much more affordable than in-person events. That was the genesis of Goldcast.”
Goldcast Customer Story
Differentiating From the Competition
Goldcast is in a competitive space, but Palash believes its differentiation stems from its strategy.
“The strategy comes from what we believe in, and the vector that we are going after. We are solving the problem of event marketing and we aim to make events go from a one-off marketing channel to recurring events.”
There are a few things that they’ve done to help set the company apart. One is their go-to-market process, as they are the only company doing that and they have a great community of followers, of their content, and of their events.
It’s deliberately orchestrated and they can run a 50-person webinar for up to five 7,000 attendee conferences. According to Palash, “total market orchestration equals the value of actionable activities at events such as data and analytics.”
Goldcast is also integrated with HubSpot which yields top prospect registrations at events, and the team handles tech on the back end to make things easier and more productive.
We are solving the problem of event marketing and we aim to make events go from a one-off marketing channel to recurring events.”
— Palash Soni, CEO & co-founder of Goldcast
Challenges as a CEO
One of Palash’s biggest challenges as a CEO was determining which market to approach, in a competitive space with many players competing for digital events. In the early days, he wasn’t sure if he was doing the right thing—and if they should focus on a specific segment or go for a wider arena. They decided to target universities, as they are often willing to pay up to $60,000 for events. So, they also went after trade shows but weren’t sure if that strategy would be successful. Today Goldcast has a broad B2B audience.
Palash said another challenge has been operating in a 100% remote environment, as that adds complexity. They work really hard to maintain a culture where employees “gel” together, but keeping morale high is difficult with so many different types of people with different preferences and managerial styles.
There’s also the expectation of coaching employees which is a complex process involving operations. To improve his skills, Palash has been working with an executive coach. He also has a great support system that includes members of the company’s board and CEO communities.
Additionally, Palash said that in the early days being an immigrant in the VC space was challenging because he had never been to the US before. He didn’t have a network or community of people to rely on, and finding investors and employees wasn’t easy. Immigration was also difficult at the time, but he did not feel there was any bias against him as an immigrant.
Advice for Aspiring CEOs
Palash has learned a lot from his journey as a CEO and he believes that success first requires having executives on board that are solid and well-aligned. He also advises aspiring CEOs to prepare in advance for growth by investing in HR practices and the implementation of cultural guidelines.
“You think about less when you are moving through the stages of growth quickly. And then it sneaks up on you and you have 50 then 100 employees—it’s like an explosion of people. You have to have a plan and be prepared for that by creating cultural guidelines and people practices. That was something I did not invest in, and it was a huge learning for me.”
Connecting With the Indian Community
Now expecting a second child, Palash said that remaining connected with the Indian community is more important than ever. Over the years, he feels he’s sort of lost touch and those relationships have diminished—mostly because Boston does not offer the same vibrant Indian community as a city like New York, for example.
“It’s important for me and my family to connect to the Indian community so we can celebrate with others and experience more of the culture than we could in just our own home alone.”
Catching Up with Palash and Goldcast in 2025
Crossing the $10M ARR Milestone
HubSpot for Startups: Goldcast recently crossed $10M in ARR. What were the biggest growth accelerators since Series A, and what challenges keep you up at night?
Palash: Crossing $10M ARR was a big milestone for us, and it’s really been fueled by our evolution into an end to end video content platform.
The shift from being a webinar/virtual event platform to becoming a full end-to-end AI-powered video content platform for B2B marketers was huge. Savvy B2B buyers today know that high-value video content is key to telling their story and building trust with their audience.
But video is hard to scale and requires lots of point solutions and specialist skills which can be an operational nightmare. We built Goldcast to solve that ground up with a purpose build AI first platform, solving multiple high value pain points such as repurposing, editing, search for nearly every marketing team we talk to.
What keeps me up at night? Scaling without losing our culture of speed and customer obsession. We’re in a hyper-competitive category where AI is evolving fast and the fault lines aren’t clear, so making sure we stay ahead of the curve, while building predictability into revenue, is the constant tension.
The Feature Everyone’s Talking About
HSFS: You’ve expanded from events to a full AI-powered video suite. Which product launch or feature is currently generating the most customer excitement?
Palash: Without question, it is the launch of the Goldcast Recording suite of products. This includes a recording studio to record HD content and our agentic video editor which slices the content and edits it professionally and on-brand to make it ready to publish across social media, websites, etc.
This has really completed our vision of an end-to-end platform for B2B video marketing by rounding out that first piece of video recording and production. It opens up new use cases such as recording video-first podcasts and use cases such as bootstrapping Youtube channels, both of which are timely and exploding in B2B.
Enterprise Strategies for Fast-tracking Video to Pipeline
HSFS: You’ve positioned Goldcast as a "content repurposing software" for B2B marketing teams. How are enterprise clients using your platform to accelerate the video-to-pipeline cycle?
Palash: With a connected flow of creation to editing, we are indeed opening up avenues for enterprise teams to run playbooks to drive pipeline that involve content repurposing.
Some examples of such plays that we have seen high adoption of are:
- LinkedIn clips posted by speakers after a webinar, which leads to a boost in on-demand leads
- Getting the most impactful soundbite from a webinar and promoting it as thought leadership ad on LinkedIn to get more leads and demos
- Repurposing virtual events into blog posts with videos embedded in it. These are always great for GEO and SEO
- Inviting customers to speak at webinars and using AI search to find the best snippets from that webinar to generate social proof seamlessly and accelerate pipeline
The impact is huge: what used to take weeks now happens in hours, so marketing can keep up with sales velocity. One customer told us Goldcast shaved 90% off their post-event content turnaround time, which means their content hits the market when buyer intent is at its peak.
Shifting the GTM Playbook
HSFS: As you scale into mid-market and enterprise segments, how is your go-to-market motion evolving? Are you maintaining a PLG-first approach, or increasingly leaning into outbound sales and ABM?
Palash: At heart, we are a sales-led organization, but our content repurposing product is available for a free trial. That pushes us to maintain the ease of use and high standards of UX that are table stakes for AI products now.
We have been able to leverage the free trials to get into the biggest organizations by giving people a quick taste of a new workflow that they probably aren’t able to do today (repurposing) or are spending way too much money and time on. In repurposing, we also don’t replace any existing tool, making the land easier.
We are then able to layer that with targeted outbound and ABM plays to expand and deploy the full platform, especially for accounts running complex event programs or global campaigns.
Even for enterprise, the ability to start with one product—like Recording Studio or Content Lab—and then expand into the full suite has been key to driving land-and-expand growth.
Where AI is Taking B2B Video Marketing Next
HSFS: AI-powered tools like Content Lab are part of your roadmap. How do you think AI will redefine B2B video marketing over the next 12–18 months?
Palash: This year, the tech and tools to make truly valuable agents has finally come of age. It is now possible to easily build agents that can use multiple tools and take in a lot of data and context to deliver end outcomes.
Now that we have all the building blocks of an end-to-end video content platform (creation, search, editing, distribution), all our focus in the next 2 years is to build agents that can use the platform to deliver end outcomes that are deemed strategic by the CMOs.
For example, we are building a YouTube agent that can plug into a company’s YouTube channel, understand context using the data Goldcast has and what’s available outside, and build a full plan to post content on YouTube to increase engagement and subscribers. It can tell what clips go into what playlists, what new playlists should be created and fed with content yet to be created on Goldcast, what type of editing to apply, etc.
Such agents will finally free up really meaningful bandwidth for marketers to be truly creative and punch way above their weight than they are able to currently.
Buyer Expectations From AI Platforms
HSFS: Have you seen a shift in buyer behavior with the rise of AI? Are marketing leaders prioritizing AI-native platforms over AI-enabled ones?
Palash: Absolutely. Buyers now draw a sharp line between "AI as a feature" and AI as a core capability. Marketing leaders want platforms where AI is built into the workflow, not tacked on as an afterthought.
At the same time, buyers don’t want to deal with tool bloat, which is a side effect of mushrooming of AI startups.
Hence, we have taken the somewhat contrarian approach of building a lot of products in parallel- recording studio, AI search, content repurposing, agentic editing, publishing via hubs, etc.
Because we know teams operating at scale need an engine to video into pipeline- not more point solutions. That resonates with CMOs who care about the operating systems of their team and about measurable impact on revenue and efficiency arising from AI adoption.
Thinking About Series B
HSFS: Any plans to raise a Series B soon? If so, what are the key growth metrics you’re setting for the next stage of investor discussions?
Palash: We certainly are at an inflection point in the company. We just finished a record-breaking quarter, driving 50% higher quarterly sales vs our previous higher. Our enterprise traction is at an all-time high. We closed Canva, OpenAI, Cohere, Gitlab, Glean, among 60 other names of similar caliber this year.
So finally, our focus on accelerating AI innovation while ensuring end-to-end platform tooling is paying off. Series B investors will mostly care about the growth rate, and the quality of that growth (e.g., enterprise revenue is always valued a lot more vs prosumer revenue) as well as NRR. And of course, they care about the long-term vision and story too, as we are just getting started and there is so much more to build!
The Leadership Lesson That Stuck
HSFS: Looking back at your 2022 journey, from HBS to Goldcast founder, what’s one key leadership lesson you’ve learned, and what advice would you offer other AAPI founders scaling their startups?
Palash: The biggest leadership lesson that I learned is around operationalizing company values. I realized that the values must come top-down from founders and can’t be a result of a democratic process.
And there has to be deliberate focused effort to operationalize them in every nook and cranny of the company. In the absence of strong adherence to values, it is hard to have clear conversations about behavior expectations from teammates at all levels, and it leads to subtle cultural drift and bitterness.
These are somewhat timeless lessons, but also hard to fathom till you have experienced the absence of values!
"We are just getting started and there is so much more to build!"
— Palash Soni, CEO & co-founder of Goldcast
Goldcast's Journey Continues
Although Palash’s story hasn’t taken a new direction, it has deepened. Goldcast’s journey from virtual events to an AI-native content platform reflects the broader shift in B2B marketing itself, from one-off interactions to end-to-end content ecosystems that drive measurable outcomes.
As Goldcast enters its next phase of growth, Palash combines leadership savvy, breakthrough technology, and data insights to transform how companies engage and grow in a virtual-first world.
With the business world already online, Palash’s push for easy, effective marketing tools is changing the way companies build relationships and grow in a virtual-first world.
Author: Mehedi Hasan Shoab
Mehedi is a SaaS writer with seven years of experience. He regularly works with industry-leading websites like HubSpot, WordPress, GetResponse, Sprout Social, Sage, and more. Mehedi has also ghostwritten for sites like Forbes, TechCrunch, and AppSumo. With thousands of articles penned, Mehedi continues to grow businesses with sizzling writing, one piece at a time. Check out his exceptional writing chops at PowerhouseBlogger.
