SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESS Newswire / September 19, 2026 / Seamus Ruiz-Earle (born October 28, 1999, in San Jose, California) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and go-to-market strategist known for building a category-defining consultancy before the age of 25. He is the founder of Carabiner Group, the firm that pioneered and trademarked the RevOps-as-a-Service model, which he started from his childhood bedroom during the COVID-19 pandemic and sold to the go-to-market growth advisory SBI in May 2024 in a high seven-figure transaction, having never raised a dollar of outside capital. Forbes named Seamus Ruiz-Earle to its 2023 30 Under 30 list in Enterprise Technology at 23, recognition that followed an earlier distinction: at 18, he was the youngest known Trailhead Ranger and Trailblazer in Salesforce history. Today Seamus Ruiz-Earle is the founder of Carabiner Capital, a private family office acquiring and investing across technology, software, and services, and serves as Managing Director of Revenue Operations and Technology at SBI. He has also served since 2016 as founder and chairman of Michael’s Way, a Bay Area nonprofit for child victims of violent crime. Across podcasts, industry forums, and executive advisory work, Seamus Ruiz-Earle argues a consistent line: companies think about revenue operations far too late, and treat as cleanup what should have been infrastructure.
From Cold Calls to the Salesforce Ecosystem
Seamus Ruiz-Earle did not set out to work in enterprise software. At 17, a student at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, he heard an investment banker speak at his high school and decided that was the career he wanted. He then did what almost no seventeen-year-old does: he cold-called roughly two dozen investment banks across San Francisco. Every one of them turned him down on the grounds of his age. The firm that finally said yes, Prager & Co., told him it could not give him anything client-facing, but it did need someone to set up its Salesforce CRM.
That consolation prize became a career. Working the platform while still an undergraduate at Boston College, Seamus Ruiz-Earle became, at 18, the youngest known Trailhead Ranger and Trailblazer in Salesforce history, a four-time Ranger inside an ecosystem where that status usually takes working professionals years. He was invited to Dreamforce 2018 as a keynote panelist on Salesforce.org’s Education Cloud programming, presented to the Trailhead Student Community, and reached the finals of the Salesforce for Students case competition, which earned him a full scholarship to the conference. ABC 7 News covered the competition. He also spoke at TEDx Boston College and was featured on Salesforce’s own podcast, The Trailblazer’s Guide to Careers.
Seamus Ruiz-Earle graduated from Boston College in 2020 with dual degrees in History and Economics, an honors thesis, departmental honors, and a finalist spot for the Dean’s Scholar Award, alongside stints as Director of Operations for the Screaming Eagles Marching Band and a community relations role with the campus police department.
Carabiner Group and the RevOps-as-a-Service Model
Seamus Ruiz-Earle had a consulting job waiting at Deloitte when the pandemic arrived and the firm, in his words, “effectively delayed my start date by nine months.” Rather than wait it out, he started sketching a consulting model from his childhood bedroom. The early client traction was strong enough that he never showed up at Deloitte at all.
What he built became Carabiner Group, and Carabiner Group became the reference point for a category that barely existed. The insight was a market condition nobody had productized: companies needed revenue operations expertise but would not commit to full-time revenue operations headcount. Carabiner Group answered that with bespoke roadmaps, technology architecture, and system integration delivered fractionally and flexibly, an approach the firm trademarked as RevOps-as-a-Service. Crucially, Carabiner Group stayed technology-agnostic across Salesforce, HubSpot, and the rest of the go-to-market stack, positioning itself as an operator’s firm rather than a single-platform reseller.
The model worked without a cent of institutional money. By 2022, Carabiner Group employed 30 people, had reached $7 million in annual revenue, and counted KPMG and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics among a client base that ran from small businesses to global enterprises.
Forbes 30 Under 30 and Industry Recognition
In late 2022, Forbes named Seamus Ruiz-Earle to its 2023 30 Under 30 list in Enterprise Technology. He was 23. The Forbes profile told the story plainly: a consulting business started in a bedroom while waiting on a delayed corporate job, early momentum strong enough to walk away from the job entirely, and a self-funded company at $7 million in revenue two years later. He was one of two Boston College alumni on that year’s lists.
Characteristically, Seamus Ruiz-Earle publicly read the honor as belonging to the discipline rather than to himself, arguing that his inclusion was a visible step toward legitimizing an operational function that had been effectively invisible inside enterprise software only a few years earlier. It is a framing consistent with how he talks about the work generally: revenue operations as plumbing that deserves to be taken seriously, not as a personal brand.
The SBI Acquisition
On May 28, 2024, SBI, the Southlake, Texas-based go-to-market growth advisory, completed its acquisition of Carabiner Group, the firm’s second acquisition in under a year. Seamus Ruiz-Earle was 24. He had built and sold the business in under four years, bootstrapped throughout, in a high seven-figure transaction.
The strategic logic was straightforward. SBI chief executive Mike Hoffman had been hearing a recurring complaint from CEOs and CFOs about the disconnect between growth strategy, the go-to-market operating model, and the commercial data meant to support both. Carabiner Group closed that gap. Seamus Ruiz-Earle said the combination was building an “unrivaled value proposition for clients,” and pointed to the alignment of digital capability with growth strategy as the unlock heading into an AI-driven era.
He did not take the exit and disappear. Seamus Ruiz-Earle stayed on as Managing Director of Revenue Operations and Technology, leading the division that was formerly Carabiner Group and advising chief executives and their teams on go-to-market strategy, Salesforce and enterprise technology transformation, and AI adoption. In May 2025 he hosted a Growth Forum for revenue operations leaders at SBI’s Spring Regional Summit, built around the question that now defines much of his work: how teams get from AI ambition to AI execution without drifting into tools in search of problems.
Carabiner Capital and Operator-Led Investing
Seamus Ruiz-Earle now runs Carabiner Capital, a private family office that acquires, builds, and invests in high-growth businesses across technology, software, and services. The firm is deliberately operator-led, pairing capital with hands-on work in go-to-market strategy, revenue operations, technology, and organizational scaling, and it extends both equity and venture debt to companies it backs.
The thesis is the autobiography. Carabiner Capital targets capital-efficient, profitable organizations with strong vertical markets, which is a precise description of the company Seamus Ruiz-Earle built himself, without venture backing, treating profitability as a constraint from day one rather than a milestone to reach later. What the firm offers founders, by its own account, is not just a check but the operational expertise and coaching that most checks do not come with.
Alongside the investing, Seamus Ruiz-Earle builds communities and experiences that bring founders, chief executives, investors, and operators into the same room. He is a founding member of CEO Collective, a breakthrough community for CEOs across 6 US-based markets, and he sits on Boston College’s West Coast Tech Council.
Michael’s Way
Long before any of the commercial success, there was Michael’s Way. Seamus Ruiz-Earle founded the Bay Area 501(c)(3) in 2016, while still in high school, to support child victims and witnesses of violent crime, and he has served as its chairman ever since. The organization runs recurring programs through the year, including a Toys “4” Kids Christmas drive, an Easter basket giveaway, and a back-to-school drive.
He chaired it through college, through building and selling Carabiner Group, and continues to chair it now. In a profile landscape crowded with founders who add philanthropy after the exit, Seamus Ruiz-Earle started with it and kept it running for a decade through everything else.
Thought Leadership on RevOps and AI
Seamus Ruiz-Earle has become a recurring voice in the revenue operations conversation, appearing on the Sales Hacker Podcast on the mistakes companies make standing up a RevOps function, contributing to Mayfield Fund’s work on data-driven revenue operations, and featuring with Formstack, Pavilion, DealPad, and The AI for Sales Podcast, among others.
His argument is structural rather than motivational. Most companies, he contends, address revenue operations far too late, treating it as a corrective applied after growth stalls instead of as infrastructure built before the strain shows. On AI, he makes a parallel case: adoption fails when it is pursued as a technology initiative disconnected from commercial strategy, and investment should be tied to measurable top-line outcomes rather than deployed because the tools exist. The motto on his personal site, borrowed from Nike co-founder Phil Knight, captures the temperament behind both: “Play by the rules, but be ferocious.”
Seamus Ruiz-Earle occupies an unusual position in the go-to-market world. He built a category, exited it before 25, stayed to operate inside the acquirer rather than cashing out into advisory work, and now deploys his own capital into the market he knows better than almost anyone his age. With go-to-market functions everywhere absorbing the shift toward AI-assisted execution, and with both an advisory platform and an investment vehicle aimed at the same problem, his influence on how B2B companies structure revenue looks likely to outlast the firm that made his name.
Media Contact:
Katie Sanford
GTM Ops, Carabiner Capital
Email: katie@carabinercapital.com
Website: seamusruizearle.com
Carabiner Capital: carabinercapital.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/seamusruizearle
SOURCE: Seamus Ruiz-Earle
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