I pulled my Drift cap out of the depths of my closet last weekend.

They had good swag - which, if you know anything about B2B company merch, is genuinely rare.

I got it years ago at a conference where David Cancel took the stage and made me feel like I was watching the future of B2B marketing being built in real time. The energy was electric. The vision was clear. I had to be a customer.

In February 2024, Drift was acquired by Salesloft and folded in quietly - one year after laying off 159 people.

The hat outlasted the company.

When Drift launched in 2015, they didn't sell chat software.

They sold a new way to think about buying. The old model - fill out a form, wait 48 hours, talk to a rep who doesn't know why you're there - was broken. Drift named it, called it out, and positioned themselves as the only company willing to say so.

They called it conversational marketing and spent years telling the market that real-time, one-to-one conversations between buyers and sellers was the only thing that made sense.

It worked. The category stuck. The brand was everywhere.

But building a category and building a business are two different things. Drift did one of them exceptionally well.