Rob Tarkoff

Chief Executive Officer Seismic

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Rob Tarkoff is Chief Executive Officer of Seismic, the San Diego company that sells software for what the industry has taken to calling go-to-market performance — the content, enablement, coaching and analytics that sit behind a revenue team. He took the job in October 2025, succeeding co-founder Doug Winter, and ten months later found himself running a substantially larger company: Seismic completed a merger with Highspot, its closest competitor, on 18 August 2026, creating a combined business of 2,500 customers and 3.5 million users under the Seismic name. He arrived with an unusually consistent career shape for the task. Across Documentum, Adobe, Lithium Technologies and Oracle he has repeatedly been the person handed a business that needed either consolidating or selling, and his own account of the merger is a strategic one rather than a defensive one — that AI is shifting the work from preparing go-to-market teams to measuring what they actually do.

Career Highlights

• Chief Executive Officer of Seismic since 3 October 2025, appointed to succeed co-founder Doug Winter, who remains a board member and advisor.
• Leads the merged Seismic-Highspot business, completed 18 August 2026, serving 2,500 customers and 3.5 million users with R&D across San Diego, Seattle, Boston, Vancouver, Toronto, London and Hyderabad.
• Ran Oracle’s Customer Experience application suite — sales, service, marketing, content and industry cloud — as Executive Vice President and General Manager from around 2018.
• President and Chief Executive Officer of Lithium Technologies from September 2011, leading the company through to its sale to Vista Equity Partners.
• Senior Vice President and General Manager of Adobe Systems’ Digital Enterprise Solutions business unit from April 2008 to September 2011.
• As Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of Documentum, oversaw the company’s five most recent acquisitions and its own sale to EMC.
• Has served as a director of Advent Software, CDK Global, Borland Software and Onyx Software.
• B.A. magna cum laude in political science and economics from Amherst College; J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School.

Professional Journey

Tarkoff read political science and economics at Amherst College, graduating magna cum laude, and then took a J.D. cum laude at Harvard Law School. He began in finance rather than law, as an analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Co., before practising as an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he worked as outside mergers-and-acquisitions counsel to technology companies including Sun Microsystems and Infoseek and advised investment banks. That combination — banking, then M&A law, then operating roles — explains a good deal of what came next.

He moved into the industry itself at Commerce One as Senior Vice President of Business Development during the business-to-business marketplace boom, striking alliances with General Motors, Covisint, SAP and Microsoft, and in 2000 sat on a Federal Trade Commission advisory panel on the regulation of B2B commerce markets. He then joined Documentum as Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, responsible for corporate strategy, business development, alliances and channels. He oversaw Documentum’s last five acquisitions and its sale to EMC, and stayed on through the EMC ownership. In June 2004 he joined the board of Onyx Software, the Bellevue CRM company, and he later served on the board of Borland Software.

In April 2008 he moved to Adobe Systems as Senior Vice President and General Manager of its Digital Enterprise Solutions business unit, a business of more than a billion dollars in annual revenue, where he is credited with shaping the company’s customer experience management strategy. He left in September 2011 to become President and Chief Executive Officer of Lithium Technologies, the online community and social customer engagement company, where he was responsible for strategy and operations and led the business to its sale to Vista Equity Partners. During that period he also joined the board of Advent Software, in September 2012, sitting on its compensation committee until the company was acquired, and later served as a director of CDK Global.

He joined Oracle in 2018 as Executive Vice President and General Manager of its Customer Experience application suite, the front-office estate spanning sales, service, marketing, content and industry cloud products, and spent roughly seven years there.

Seismic announced him as Chief Executive Officer effective 3 October 2025, taking over from co-founder Doug Winter, who had run the company since its founding more than fifteen years earlier and who stayed on as a board member and advisor. Four months into the job, in February 2026, Seismic announced its intent to merge with Highspot; the transaction completed on 18 August 2026. The combined company kept the Seismic name and Tarkoff as chief executive, retained Seattle and Vancouver among its research and development sites, and set out to build a single AI platform spanning enablement, content, learning, coaching and analytics across the revenue lifecycle. He works alongside Hayden Stafford, Seismic’s President and Chief Revenue Officer, who has held that role since March 2022.

Education

Harvard Law School

J.D., cum laude

Amherst College

B.A., political science and economics, magna cum laude