Vol 32. Insights from Neat’s VP of Marketing

Case Studied Experts
Meet Priscilla Barolo

Each week, we sit down with a marketing leader to learn more about their career, insights, and accomplishments.

This week, that leader is Priscilla Barolo, VP of Marketing at Neat. Before her current role, Priscilla spent nearly a decade at Zoom, where she helped shape the company’s brand and communications through one of the most remarkable growth stories in tech.

Here are the need-to-knows about Priscilla:

• She was Zoom’s first marketing hire, joining when it was a ten-person startup.

• She led Zoom’s global communications through the pandemic, steering messaging as the company scaled 30x in a matter of months and saw unprecedented media attention.

• At Neat, she’s currently focused on driving awareness and growth for the video hardware company (which Zoom is an investor in).

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From nonprofits to the startup world

After studying sociology, Priscilla started her career in nonprofits. She was doing direct service at first, then fundraising. “I was living in a major city making $34,000 a year,” she recalled. “It was tough. I wanted to help people, but I wasn’t growing.” That realization pushed her to get an MBA, at which point she landed on marketing.

Her transition from nonprofit work to marketing wasn’t as big a leap as it looked. “In nonprofits, you’re basically running campaigns,” she said. “You write fundraising appeals, plan events, manage creative. The materials are different, but the ideas are the same.”

After finishing her MBA at Santa Clara University, Priscilla spotted a post in the school’s LinkedIn alumni group for a role at a small startup called Zoom. She applied and landed the job. “It was total luck,” she said. “But the kind that comes from putting yourself out there.”

The early Zoom days

“When I joined Zoom, it was ten guys in two rooms—and me,” Priscilla laughed. “We had no brand awareness. We’d say, ‘It’s like Webex, but better.’ That was our pitch.”

Her first assignments were as scrappy and hands-on as it gets: drafting one-pagers, designing the homepage, standing behind a folding table at local events handing out flyers. “It was very rudimentary marketing,” she explained. What surprised Priscilla most was how fast Zoom’s product spread.

As the company grew, she transitioned into communications under Janine Pelosi, who remains her boss today. “Janine built the broader marketing engine, and I got to help shape comms: PR, social, internal comms, content, customer advocacy, all of it.”

Before the pandemic, Zoom was already a thriving SaaS success story. Then, 2020 hit and everything changed.

Leading through the storm

“I had just had my second child in December 2019,” Priscilla said. “Then suddenly everyone’s using Zoom for everything, from SNL to school board meetings.”

Her small team—fewer than ten people across PR, social, and internal comms—was soon fielding 10,000 media inquiries a month. “We were working 16-hour days. It was chaos, but purpose-driven chaos,” she said. “People were relying on Zoom for AA meetings, classrooms, and medical care. It felt like we were helping people in real time.”

The focus of the brand shifted overnight from driving awareness to protecting trust. “Security and privacy of our users became our top priorities. We had to rethink our marketing strategy and messaging completely and do it from our living rooms.” She credits Zoom’s leaders Eric Yuan and Janine Pelosi for staying calm and decisive. “That’s what leadership in crisis looks like.”

Building something new at Neat

After nine years at Zoom, Priscilla took time off to rest and spend more time with her two young children. “I consulted, taught a short course at Stanford on corporate communications, and worked maybe three hours a day. It was exactly what I needed.”

That consulting work led her back to Neat, a Zoom-invested hardware company she’d helped launch back in 2019. When Neat brought on Janine Pelosi as CEO in 2023, Priscilla joined as VP of Marketing.

“The transition from comms to full marketing has been a tremendous learning experience,” she said. “I had to expand our demand-gen engine and field marketing function, and really think across the whole funnel. It’s been stretching, but so rewarding.”

With Neat, Priscilla is also navigating the transition from software to hardware. “I thought it’d be a straight line, but it’s totally different,” she said. “For example, we focus on getting our products physically in people’s hands through events and roadshows.”

Neat sells through partners and distributors worldwide, so relationships are everything. “Our marketing is very people-centric. When you can put a Neat device in front of someone and show them how it tracks faces and frames a room, that’s when it clicks.”

A Standout Campaign

One of Neat’s most visible marketing efforts under Priscilla’s leadership has been its partnerships with the LA Clippers and Oracle Red Bull Racing. 

With the Clippers, the partnership centers on the Intuit Dome, one of the most technologically advanced arenas in the world. Neat branded the suites level (“the Neat Suites”) and filmed a campaign right on the Clippers’ court to spotlight how its devices transform even the largest spaces into connected meeting environments. 

The Oracle Red Bull Racing partnership took the same experiential approach. Neat equipped the team’s headquarters with its hardware and hosted 150 partners and customers for an event that connected the speed and precision of F1 racing to the speed and simplicity of Neat’s meeting technology. 

“Someone joked about comparing how fast a car laps the track to how fast you can unbox a Neat device—and the team ran with it. They produced an entire campaign based on that idea,” Priscilla laughed.

“These partnerships aren’t about visibility, they’re about storytelling,” she said. “They let people experience the brand firsthand and see what makes our technology different.”

Advice and Takeaways

1) Don’t wait until you feel ready.

From changing industries to managing a sudden growth spike at Zoom, changes came fast in Priscilla’s career. It’s no wonder that she believes our strongest skills are forged in fire. “There’s no way to prepare for everything. You just dive in and learn as you go,” she said. 

“There are studies that say women in particular will wait until they are basically overqualified to apply for a job or take on a new challenge,” Priscilla explained. Instead of waiting to feel “qualified”, try diving into a new, unfamiliar challenge. Identify what you know and what you don’t know, and then map out your plan of action. Getting a little uncomfortable can go a long way in building both skills and confidence. 

2) Lead with purpose, especially in crisis.

During the pandemic, Priscilla’s team was under unimaginable pressure. What kept her grounded was purpose. “We were exhausted, but we knew people depended on us. That gave everything meaning.”

When work gets overwhelming, reconnect to the why. Purpose can turn pressure into progress and help keep teams resilient when everything feels uncertain.

3) Keep evolving your playbook.

Moving from software to hardware forced Priscilla to unlearn and relearn fast. “You can’t just apply old frameworks to new problems. You have to be a sponge again.”

Whether you’re shifting industries or functions, embrace a beginner's mindset. Ask questions, experiment, and reframe what success looks like in each new context. The faster you let go of what used to work, the faster you’ll spot what actually moves the needle in your new environment.

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