"It seems like there's a playbook for everything. There's a framework for everything. But the reality is you have to spend the hours and the time to really understand your customer. You were the first ..."

"Critica was the first marketing hire and VP of marketing at OpenAI, the first marketing hire at Stripe where she was the only marketing person for 3 years. She was also an early marketing leader at Re..."

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"what lessons we can extract about your time uh leading marketing at these companies. And I want to start with OpenAI. No big deal. You were the first marketing hire at OpenAI. Things seem to have gone..."

"having a sales conversation, how likely is it that you close them? How likely is it that you win that deal? That usually tells you very astutely, do you have product market fit? Like once you're alrea..."

"hiring a demand generator may be the worst thing that you can do versus thinking about more of a product marketer who's thinking about the competitive differentiation, the positioning, the sales enabl..."

"have to have a lot of that ability to throw away work when you might have spent a ton of calories on this wonderful piece of content, but if it's not working, don't double down on it. Like that that b..."

"on it. Let me summarize what you just shared here. So essentially, if you uh think you're like, I need help with marketing or I have a problem and I think I'm going to I need to hire a demand genen pe..."

"the the date framework. I just coined it. Beautiful. Okay, we got a new framework. Hot off the presses. I love it. Date. Okay, with um differentiation, what's your thoughts on being saying you're just..."

"Okay, so let's let's go through an example of of a company you did this with and this may take us to another company you worked at and the stories there. Yeah, one that comes to mind is definitely Ret..."

"the game. And here, you know, one of the ways to think about that is, hey, should we just scale the paid marketing channels that we already have working for us? And that's when the diagnostic really c..."

"the competitors, you know, we saw that they were doing a lot of content marketing, they were doing a lot of events programming and like we could have kind of followed in those footsteps, but there was..."

"discarded the ones that didn't. Okay there's so much here. So in the diagnose step, I think a kind of a uh between the lines piece of advice here is look at what's already working. So you looked at, o..."

"recall a very specific example at Stripe where uh you know our our product Stripe Connect which was made for marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb where not only are you accepting money as a platform you'..."

"that's a great segue to Stripe, which uh uh another company you were the very first marketing hire at. You were also I believe, the only marketing person for three years at Stripe. I do not recommend ..."

"as well. Like you couldn't really play act at understanding the product especially when developers are trained to spot bugs, right? So not only do they spot those bugs in code, they spot those bugs in..."

"And so I kind of see it in different epochs or or chapters of my time at the company. The first chapter when I joined, our head of partnerships at the time, Christina Cordova, handed me a an a hackpad..."

"then the work of marketing became how do you help people understand and navigate potentially this multi-product ecosystem and platform to figure out what's the right set of features and solutions that..."

"having a team structure that was T-shaped people who could be flexible to those needs of the company. Coming back to your point about how there's no playbooks is that is Stripe another example where i..."

"just like the traditional education of marketing. Is there is there anything there? One thing that's definitely made me is very skeptical of most marketing channels and strategies and tactics. And so ..."

"in SAS conferences. Okay. There's uh something I heard that you did at Stripe that I wanted to ask you about that worked really well. When you came into Stripe, you looked at all of the biggest custom..."

"product marketing and messaging because it it really tells you what are their pain points and how can you meet them where they are. You want them nodding their heads along as they're reading your land..."

"typically with very technical folks on the other side. So, yeah, that was a a great way and a great program to figure out what content we should focus and prioritize. These are really cool uh just lit..."

"LinkedIn ads. There's something else that I know that you're a big advocate of, which is uh internal reviews and just making sure everyone's aligned, which I think a lot of people and especially start..."

"up some of these processes with the intention of trying to help them navigate how to go from idea to execution can be very empowering and powerful. Nobody wants to do the wrong thing. They want the gu..."

"Yeah. and and you got to take that responsibility seriously because even with something like Stripe, we know that people are going to come try out things that we put out the door. And so we wanted to ..."

"that was the first foray into saying hey our our work is not just announcing research breakthroughs it is about putting products into the market. So there's a few questions I ask here. One is just lik..."

"for it. The second for me is that you're distinguishing enough between capital M marketing and lowercase M marketing. And this is an important distinction I've learned over the years, which is capital..."

"have Brian back to talk about that. That'd be really interesting. I wanted actually to ask so an interesting thing is happening with JGBT versus Claude. And if like it's so interesting, Claude is argu..."

"And so that's going to take a lot of change management and a lot of collaboration between a variety of different organizations rather than just the companies themselves and the product experience itse..."

"organization. I think challenging of course is just being at the eye of the storm, right? The eye of the eye of the hurricane. And so all eyes are on OpenAI at all times. And I I think that is a a goo..."

"with the needs of the company. Also let's uh shift to talking about thrive which is where you work now and I talk about what your role is and what's interesting I think about this role is you get to w..."

"variety pack in the best way possible. And so what are the what are some things you've learned so far because I imagine this is a very different experience uh that I don't know especially things you'v..."

"the the reason that they want to work with Thrive is not because we are bringing our past experiences to the table, but rather because they're trying to do something new that has never been done in th..."

"becomes your calling card in the world. Like if a company needs brand expertise they go for this kind of flavor of CMO. Or if a company needs to really grow their pipeline or their demand gen or their..."

"little bit easier. That's such a good point. A good segue to an AI question. We got to talk about AI. One of your former colleagues, Kevin Garcia, wanted me to ask you something. He suggested I ask yo..."

"taste. I love that it's such a simple actionable thing you can do. Yeah. At Thrive we have this share channel which is just sharing things that we're seeing out into the world. It's not particularly d..."

"else has. That reminds me, I wanted to come back to sort of close out our conversation. I wanted to come back to pricing strategy. I had that in my notes here and I haven't gone back to it. Uh so let ..."

"you know what is that unit of completion for things like code generators is going to be it's going to be a wild wild west before we come up with something that is as internalized now as seedbased pric..."

"self-hosted. So that insight kind of led us to say, hey, where is the delineation here? Because the sales team should be talking to larger customers, landing larger deals, and so to align those two wa..."

"even at OpenAI, it's one of the things that we advised most enterprises to invest in first is their own operational efficiency rather than just the AI magic dust they could sprinkle on top of their pr..."

"This reminds me of when Kevin Wheel was on the podcast talking about Libra which was this cryptocurrency project that Facebook ran and he's just like "Okay, that was a terrible time to launch somethin..."

"together. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. We have five questions for you. Are you ready? Hit me. Here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending..."