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Geoff Baum

Geoff Baum headshot
Geoff Baum
Executive Fellow/Chief Mentor, Lazaridis Institute

Geoff Baum is a founder and international product and marketing expert who focuses on positioning, messaging, and go-to-market processes, including customer discovery and development. He frequently works with fast-growing companies to support their transition from founder-led growth to scalable and repeatable, team-based growth models. 

Baum was a long-time Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Adobe, where he led the creation and development of a variety of new products, including award-winners like Photoshop.com, Photoshop Express, Premiere Express, and Adobe’s first apps for iPhone and Android devices. The Adobe products he and his teams created are now used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide with several of them spending long periods of time as the most downloaded app on Apple’s App Store and Google's Play Store.

Baum frequently works with startups and scale-ups and has advised and mentored over 500 companies from more than two dozen countries, including the United States, Canada, Germany, Korea, Japan, Netherlands, Argentina, Mexico, Ukraine, Poland, Turkey, UK, and Ireland. Since 2018, Baum has served as the Chief Mentor and Executive Fellow for the Lazaridis Institute’s ScaleUp program at Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. In this role, Baum designed and developed a year-long program to support Canada’s highest-potential, fast-growing scale-ups. Baum recruited and built Canada’s leading scale-up expert ecosystem that included mentors and speakers from across North America and Europe. The 80 companies that have participated in ScaleUp have enjoyed tremendous success and gone on to raise nearly $2.5 billion (CAD) in funding and create approximately 4500 new jobs since joining the program.

Before working at Adobe, Geoff was the co-founder and VP Marketing at Garage.com, alongside world-famous author and tech evangelist Guy Kawasaki and Forbes magazine Publisher Rich Karlgaard. Garage.com developed Silicon Valley’s first venture capital investment bank, which, in many ways, served as the predecessor to the Y Combinator model of equity-driven accelerators. Garage.com helped more than 150 startups raise capital from the industry’s leading VCs and angels and invested directly in its clients, including Pandora (IPO), Lefthand Networks (acquired by HP), NetConversions (acquired by aQuantive/Microsoft), Motley Fool, and uNav (acquired by Atheros), among many others. Baum served as the VP of Marketing and general manager for the world-renowned Bootcamp for Startups series of international startup training workshops.

Geoff started his career in Silicon Valley as the Economics Editor and columnist for Forbes ASAP and has a BA and MA from Stanford and an MS from UC Davis where he studied on a USDA fellowship.