#126: Career | How to Navigate Early-Stage Marketing and Your Compensation Package (with Emily Kramer and Kathleen Estreich from MKT1)

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My guest on this episode is Kathleen Estrich and Emily Kramer. They're the co founders of MKT1. Kathleen and Emily, thank you for doing this. So reason I reached out was you have some amazing early stage marketing comp and salary benchmark type stuff and there's a lot in there that we're going to dig into. But first, just to kick us off, Kathleen, let's start with you. Just give some background on who you are, what you've been doing and then we can talk about your company too.

Sure, absolutely. I'm Kathleen. I work with Emily at MKT1. Prior to starting MKT1, I started my career on the Facebook marketing team where I was for several years in a variety of different marketing capacities. I then went to Box where I led the platform marketing team and ran our first developer conference while I was there and then went to Intercom Where I was leading a bunch of functions as we were kind of scaling up, including kind of helping set the strategy for us going up market. I then went to a small startup, Seeds, a startup called Scalar. I joined when it was very small, helped raise our series A, was leading the marketing team and also took on a handful of other functions outside of marketing and then left and took a little bit of time off and then reconnected with Emily, who I've known for several years to start MKT1.

Okay, let's talk about MKT1 in a minute. But Emily first. Background.

Yeah. So picking up where Kathleen left off, I met her because her sister was on my team at Asana in the early days. So her sister introduced me to Kathleen and that's how we met. So I think that's kind of a funny way to meet someone. Anyway, so I have been in marketing for my whole career. I started at ad agencies, I went to business school, which I'm not sure if I recommend, and then still not sure. It's 10 years out, still not sure. And then I started working at startups. So I was early on the marketing team at Ticketfly, which is now part of Eventbrite. And then I went over to Asana where I was the first marketer. And you'll get a theme here. I've always been like the first or second marketer at various stage companies. So I joined Asana when It was like 35 people, was the first marketer, essentially helped build that team up over just under four years, built the team to about 25, 30 people. The company went from very small amounts of revenue, got her a million to about 25 million in revenue when I was there. And then I went to a seed funded startup in a similar, similar space to Asana called Astro, helped them raise their Series A, helped them launch and was leading marketing and sort of ops as well. And then I went to Carta and similar to my other roles, I was sort of the first marketer. There wasn't any marketing there at the time. There was some like marketers. There's a marketer doing stuff on the sales side but on the sales team and like, but no real marketing team. But there were 300 people at about 25 million in revenue, a little less and had a lot of salespeople. So what they had was basically like not a lot of process, not a lot of like rev ops, kind of a mess of messaging. And they also had rebranded from E Shares to Carta like three or four months before. And people know that that happened. So they did a great job considering they had no marketing team. But people didn't really know that Eshares had changed to Carta. So a lot of kind of like move really quickly to build a foundation at a company that's already pretty far along. So I was there for just under two years, built that team to about 25 or 30 as well, and then explored some venture backed startup ideas for a few months. Did a free project, help people find roles after the COVID layoff situation two years ago, right when Covid started and then started helping people evaluate compensation. Because of my background at Carta, did some free compensation reviews and then I actually filed a lawsuit against Carta, which I won't get too into, but further built my interest in helping people with compensation. So Kathleen and I then started MKT1, which I call Market One, which is confusing. We don't know what it's called. It's like what not to do when you're naming your company.

But I was going to say that by the way, I meant to ask you how you and I forgot and then either you or Kathleen said mkt1 and my mind literally just exploded because I was like, wait a second, that is not how I would have said that.

You are not the only one to say that.

We actually like have the URL for like mkt1 or sorry, market1.IO. Yeah, look like we weren't sure what was going to happen when we started working together. We started like consulting and advising on a couple of things and weren't sure where it was going to go. And now we have a fund and an advisory business and multiple things named this and we're like, we don't even know how to say it. But yeah, we'll be changing it to Market one. But you can call it whatever you want for now and take this as a lesson and name your company something pronounceable.

Yeah. Or take it as a lesson that like in some cases it might not even matter. It's the core of the company. It's like it will find itself out. You both have like impressive backgrounds. People that will listen to this would love to talk about each one of those things. But I wanted to just ask even before we get into the comp stuff. I have some other things that I'm like a crazy. I scribble notes while I'm interviewing and we go in different directions. So let's just talk about market one, MKT1. What's the goal of the company? Are you exclusively investing as it relates to marketing? What's the thesis for what you're doing.

We work with companies on MKT1. We work mostly with B2B SaaS companies. Some DevTools, some FinTech, but mostly in the B2B SaaS space because that's where our backgrounds are deepest on the marketing side. And so we work with companies and startups to help build their marketing functions and that's kind of our goal there. So we do that in a variety of different ways, whether that's helping advise the founders on that, helping work with the early marketing team, and we also invest through our fund in companies, but all through that kind of umbrella of helping startups build their early marketing functions.

Got it. Okay, awesome. Okay, awesome. So let's talk here for a minute. B2B SaaS. Being the first marketer, early stage startups, I think one thing that happens at a lot of companies that at least I've seen is like everybody's kind of just doing stuff a lot of times there's a lot of things going on and it's not always necessarily like pointed in the right direction. You might not have a perfect framework, but do you have a philosophy on this kind of standard operating procedure for a B2B SaaS company, either as the first marketer or as you think about working with those types of companies? What is the first marketing job? What is the framework? How do you think about that? Even for you personally, you've been first marketer at a bunch of these different SaaS companies. Do you have a way of doing things, a philosophy?

I think I have non philosophies or philosophies about what not to do almost more so than what to do. I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they come in, especially at early stage companies, is they think that what they did at a larger company or what they did at any other company is going to work in marketing. And I always say that marketing isn't really like a playbook thing. You have to make a playbook for your company that works, but it's a framework thing. Like there's a slight difference, right? Like you can't just take the same playbook that you've used before and use it at the new company. So I think you have to recognize that. And then the first thing you need to start with is like, you have to understand your audience. So like in parallel to understanding the product, which I think marketers always know to do, like I have to know what the product does. Like you need to know how the audience thinks about everything beyond your product. As well. So I think it starts with a deep understanding of the audience and a deep understanding of the product and then starting to figure out we use this analogy for marketing. Like there's so many different sub functions of marketing, product marketing, growth marketing, content marketing, et cetera, et cetera. And we use this analogy of if you take all that jargon away, there's the fuel and there's the engine. And the fuel is like the content, the messaging, creative. The engine is the growth channels, the tooling, the optimization, all of that stuff. And you have to build the right fuel for your audience and then you have to build the right engine for your fuel that also works for the audience. And so I'm constantly in those situations and when we work with startups now is trying to figure out what's the fuel that's really going to add value, like what is this audience craving or what do they need, what's going to be most helpful to them. And then obviously the product fits into that fuel as well in terms of what things know about the products and then figuring out the right engine for that audience. So I guess that's the closest thing to like how I think about starting with marketing early on is figure out your fuel and your engine for your audience that fits together.

I love that. I love fuel and engine. Like I've tried to articulate it as like brand and demand sometimes but I think like I've like managed in my last job but much a much smaller team was like six people and it was like you kind of have early stage. You have like you might hire Emily, but Emily might be your content person. But Emily might also have to do product marketing for the beginning or something. It's very hard to like articulate. But I love fuel and engine because it almost gives you like a philosophy to think about. Like it's easy to get in the weeds of like we need to hire this a product marketing person, a demand gen person. I've seen a lot of companies, they just kind of like hire one of everything and everyone's working like differently. But you think about it at high level, like here's a strategy. We have the engine which is going to be all these systems and we have the fuel which is going to be the content, the creativity.

Yeah, I think it's really helpful even as you're scaling the team too to just balance. Do I have too much fuel right now and not enough engine? Do I have not enough engine? And whatever the opposite of what I said was and do you have the right kind of fuel? And the right engine. And so it's really helpful throughout in marketing to just make sure you're balancing both sides, both in hiring and the activities you're doing.

I'm just going to add one of the things that we've noticed with early stage companies when they think about who to hire. One of our philosophies is like you need to hire a pie shaped marketer like as your first marketing hire. So that's 3.14 pie, not slice of pieces.

I just wrote down pie P I E and then scribbled it out.

We have made sure to do that when we're doing talking things. We learned that the hard way when we went on for like five minutes on a pie shaped thing and everyone's.

Like, slice the pie. What is this? No.

So unlike tea, a pie shaped two legs across. And that's I think really important when you think about kind of early marketing hires is they can't just own one function. They're kind of coming in and have to have to have breadth and depth. And we think that they need to have some depth or competency in two of the three areas of marketing. I think it's really important because early on you have to cover a lot more ground and as you get to bigger and bigger marketing teams, the roles get more narrow. But I think early on having those folks who can span a couple of the functions is really important.

You two have this articulated perfectly and a lot of startup founders ask this and I think a lot of marketing people ask this. But you can't just hire like the individual specialists at this stage. I've also found that like hiring mistakes that I've made at least is come when I haven't like at this stage like actually tested into an area. And I think when you have a pie shaped marketer, you have a marketing person who might do content, social and event marketing. Like have the content person test your first two event concepts, see if that works. Oh wow, this is a channel. Now let's go hire an event marketing person to actually like own this and scale.

Yeah.

On that note, something I often tell founders, unlike sales where it's just hire an ae, hire another ae, hire another ae. Like your planned order of hiring should change with every person you hire. So you're gonna make a hiring plan and then it's gonna be broken when you hire someone because you're building the team around them.

So true.

Yeah. So for me, when I've hired first 10 employees, it's always changed dramatically from what I thought it would look like, and the people I hire are. There are two vertical lines in that pie shape are never exactly what I thought either, but that's great. Like, I love when people surprise me and have a different area of expertise than others. And I kind of look for people that break the hiring plan in some ways.

And I think you have the right mindset, which is like, you don't know that the team is going to evolve, the company is going to evolve. The company's moving so much, all of a sudden, six months in, you're going to go enterprise and you got a bunch of content people doing freemium SEO stuff. It's going to be a completely different mix. Plus, oftentimes at the early stage, you see people kind of bubble up on a team. Like, you maybe hired one person to run to do content, and all of a sudden she actually turns into like this badass, like, probably going to be your marketing leader person. And you don't know that in the early stage. And so you can kind of like, it gives you a little bit more ability. My follow up to this is going to be, how do you find those people, though? Because it's much easier to go find. Like, oh, this is Dave. You know, he ran paid at box and we need somebody to do paid. How do you even find that profile?

So I think the market's competitive, so we'll start with that. It's hard to find these people, but I think you need to look for a few signals within these folks. Like, I think finding people who have been through some form of growth at a company, maybe they started in one area but taken on another, and maybe they weren't the number one, but they were number two or three at a high growth company, but then they're ready to actually go and be that first marketing hire. I think it's really hard to hire someone like either of you two to go in the really early stage because you just don't really want to go that early until some things are figured out. And. And so I think it's getting that balance right of someone who has enough experience and can set a plan and strategy, but is not necessarily so far away from the execution side of things that they're not going to come in and roll up their sleeves. I think folks who are coming from really big companies who have never worked at a startup like marketing behind a big brand is very different than trying to build a brand from the ground up and get people to buy in and listen to you. And so I think if you've only worked at big Companies going to a small startup is going to be a big challenge. I think that if you've only done a pretty siloed role like we were just talking about earlier, I think great marketers for early stage companies have taken on multiple aspects of marketing or at least seen it and been close enough to it where if you're coming from a very siloed role, I think you're going to struggle to see how the pieces fit together at the early stage. So there's a lot of non patterns versus patterns of where to find people. And then I think as a founder, you're trying to hire these people. Marketers are inherently storytellers. So I think to attract the right people, you need to have a really compelling story of why your company is a great place for a marketer to be and the opportunity is there. So I think there's a selling side on the company, company side of things to actually tell a compelling story to a marketer that's going to resonate and what the opportunities there are to attract the right folks. But it's a very competitive market. But I think it's, it's doable to find these people. But you, you know, you're going to be taking a bet on someone. And so one of the things that Emily and I caution founders about when they're hiring these first folks is like make sure that they don't have too many firsts. So if it's their first time at a startup, first time doing that job, first time, you know, working in that business model or something like that, like if there's too many of those first, they're probably not set up for success. But if there's one or two, I think it's worth a bet for the right people.

Yeah, that's great. Like they've done content before, but they've never done it at the enterprise or something or at startup level. Emily, you were scribbling notes during that. You have some follow up, Go ahead.

I was just doodling.

I thought you were like, here's some like killer one liner. I'm going to hop in.

No, I mean, I could probably pull out a killer one liner here, Dave, but that's not what I was doing. I was just dribbling. I can't sit still. So that's my thing over here. I mean, I think Kathleen covered it pretty well. And then it goes back to people who aren't super siloed who have the ability to set strategy across the entire team and execute really well in a couple of areas of marketing.

Like we said, this is great.

This is great, great advice for founders and also marketing people that will listen to this. I have one more thing I want to get to before we get to job titles and comp. Now that I've been called out on thinking that somebody's taking notes about this podcast. Relax, dude, it's not that interesting. Emily mentioned, like, there's no playbook. And I think that is such important advice because, like, you know, I'm guilty of this all the time, but, like, we love to put out marketing advice onto LinkedIn and Twitter and whatever, and it's like so much nuance in it. This all kind of comes down to the CEO and the founder though, right? Like. Cause you have to have a vision for, like, why are we hiring marketing? What do we want marketing to achieve? How will we go to market? Does that get set by the you on the way in, or have you found that it's gotta come at the founder level?

I think that, like, when founders are hiring, I think it's important that they understand or have a hunch on, like, again, who the audience is, what the fuel might be, like, what they think is going to work for that audience. For some audiences, you pretty early on realize, oh, this is just the easiest example, but this is a thing that people search for. SEO is going to be huge. We need to create SEO related content. We need to have a website that's set up for technical SEO really well. Like, we need to kill it on SEO. Or they might say, oh, on the engine side, like, you know, we know that this is going to be a lot of outbound, so we need to have compelling things to share in those outbound emails, like, whatever it might be. You kind of have a sense for what the fuel might be and what the engine might be. I think you want to have that sense as a founder and keep it flexible enough. And I think as a marketer looking at these jobs, you want the founder to have some sense, but you don't want them to be so strongly opinionated that they're not going to change their mind if it doesn't work. So you don't want someone that's like, SEO is the only way. You want to kind of make sure there's some flexibility there in their thinking, but they have some hunch because they should have done that research on the audience before they built this company. So I think having that general sense will help you kind of get kind of the right person in. And the last thing I'll say on that is, like, I think that the most important relevant experience besides having, like, been at a startup that's growing and being able to operate at that speed at a company of that size. And it's just. I just totally forgot what I was gonna say. I am doing great this morning. I am crashing in the. You're listening to my dad's XFRY podcast.

Gonna say Kathleen. I will tell you that Kathleen said that this morning is not your time.

Oh, no.

And she ratted you out before.

Oh, you shouldn't need to rat me out. I am the least of a morning person that I think I've ever met in my life. I need like two hours of awake time and like silence before I can do good. What was I trying to say, Kathleen? I don't know.

But one thing I was going to add, I don't know where that train was going, but something about pies. One thing for marketers to look for when you're talking to founders in these early stage companies is like, how opinionated are the founders about sort of the messaging and like how they're building the product. Because if it's just a me Too product, particularly in a competitive space, you want to know that the company has some strong opinions around something. Like, you don't want two strong opinions where they're not flexible, but you want something that you know you can work with as a marketing perspective that you can leverage in the work that you're doing. So that is something for a marketer. I would ask, you know, the founders, what are some of the strong opinions or how do we build the product in an opinionated way that I think will help you as a marketer have a more interesting story to tell, especially as things are so noisy these days.

Love that. That's a great ask on the way in, like when you're. Because a lot of marketing people don't often interview the founder back. Like, you know, I have your article and you talk about how this is a marketer's. A marketer's market right now. Like, you should be interviewing the company and. And if you're going. If you're talking to the founder about the vision and like, you know, what's your opinion and the way that the product is trying to win right now is because it's going to be easier to use than. It's like, that's not a real opinion.

Yeah, I'm going to bring the train back into the station. On the previous thought, it was that the most important relevant experience you can have is the business model experience. So, like, I think Something that is really helpful to have when you come into a startup is experience in the same business model. So you want the startup to have a general sense of what the business model is. If you've only worked in a top down sales B2B company, coming into a product led growth, bottom up company is going to be a stretch. It's like pretty different now. Some companies have more of a hybrid model these days. They're kind of doing both things and then some of your experience might be relevant. But that's something we often tell founders. It's not necessarily experience with the audience that matters as much as it's the business model experience. So make sure you fit into that vision.

Yeah, that's great advice too. Here's another question before we're going to get into the comp stuff. How do you talk about recruiting with your companies today? Because easily, number one email I get is from a founder that's like, hey, who's the next CMO you got? I'm like, I don't know, I don't have just like a stable of like of names. And hearing you talk about the business model like just keeps me going back to like, well, I think you just got to always be on LinkedIn looking and trying to find people that have done this in a similar business model. And you're going to go there. But curious to hear your opinions on like, how are people finding marketing candidates today other than when their sister is friends with someone?

Yeah, exactly. I actually got my job at Asana because I was a camp counselor my whole life. Not my whole life. I wasn't like five and a camp counselor. I went to camp my whole life and I was a camp counselor as a teenager and my camper in my cabin was a recruiting coordinator at Asana and was like, emily, you should talk to the coo. And that's how I got my job. So you never know. But beyond that, unfortunately right now you're not getting a lot of inbound on these marketing roles. And so it's a lot of outbound, targeted outbound with an actual compelling message for why you want to talk to that person and why this is a good fit for them. And this comes back to the vision thing. You have to have a compelling vision and you have to have a compelling reason why a marketer would be excited to come to that company. And that could be a really interesting business model or a really interesting story or a product that is just really going to change the game. You've got to figure out what your hook is. It's like you have to market to the marketing candidates, they care about those things. So it's a lot of outbound right now, which is, I think, new for people with marketing. It's changed a lot and so it's harder. But all that said, as a marketer right now, if there's a startup you're excited about and that you've seen what they're doing or you're just aware of it, you've read about them, reach out to the founder because chances are they're looking for a marketer. Even if it's not up on the job page, they're probably so busy they haven't gotten to it. Reach out to founders of things that you're excited about if you believe you're a fit to be a marketer there.

Because I think I'm trying to stitch together things that you've both said. But to me it is about you have to build an employment brand who you want to be. And you kind of both have articulated, you need to have a vision, you need to have opinions, because, yeah, you're not going to go after every candidate on LinkedIn, but how can you be looking through the stream of people that have a similar business model? And so if you're in a similar space, but it's like if you don't have anything to say, you're not challenging any beliefs, you don't have any vision and you're not putting, maybe you have that, but you're not putting that out in the market. Well, how do you think people are just going to magically find you? And by the way, when you go into the comp stuff, it's very competitive. You marketers today can make a pretty good living and so fewer companies today can compete on salary. You can go get that offer anywhere if you know what you're talking about.

Yeah, I think the candidate experience and sort of employment branding stuff is so important. It's been important for several years now and actually at my last two companies I actually ran recruiting, so very familiar with kind of the competitive market, especially for startups, because you can't. And startups can't compete always on comp, like these bigger companies can pay, especially on the cash side, a lot more. And so there has to be another reason of why you want to work there. It's the autonomy, it's the ownership, it's the impact that you can have, it's the ability to like, take that step, function, growth within your career as a marketer of why you would want to go and join these early stage companies, but you have to be aligned on the vision, you have to be aligned on the culture and how things work, especially in this remote world. I think it's important to understand like how does the company actually get work done and does that align with the way that you want to work? So all of those things are, I think even more important for a startup.

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Go check them out, Understand and get right and sell. Because you can't always compete just on computer, especially on the cash side. That's where equity can potentially play a bigger role.

Okay, let's talk about comp. I want to link to this. I'm going to link to your substack newsletter so people can get all of the companion spreadsheet and everything. But let me try to summarize this. Basically, good luck. No, I'm summarizing what it's about. You all have to explain what's in here. So basically what Kathleen and Emily have put together is. And there's a bunch of stuff about the background on this and kind of Emily's story from Carta and everything else, but I just want to read this. Why is it a marketing candidate's market right now? It's not just your perception. The last year was the most competitive market for early stage marketers I've seen in my 10 years in startup marketing. Huge rounds, growth expectations are more aggressive than ever. The budget to spend on go to market goes up. Some marketers are in high demand. Here's the problem. Somebody who's been on the other side of this and as a white male, like, who would have the easiest time on this. All of these numbers that you go through, you have no sense you're about to take a startup marketing job. It's not like you have 10 friends who are also taking startup marketing jobs. So you can go and compare. And so like I've flown this blind and been like, sure, I don't know this 0.1% of they tell me the company's gonna go to 10 billion. 1% sounds awesome. And then I go and I read your thing and it's like, that is actually super low equity. And so Emily and Kathleen have put together these amazing benchmarks and there's a lot of nuance to this you'll have to read. But what I love about what you put together, and my rant is almost over, I promise, is that you're actually outlining the steps that people should go through when they're getting their offer. Because I talked to a lot of the marketers that's like, it's pulling teeth. The CFO will not tell me these numbers. Or you're oftentimes like talking with someone in recruiting, the recruiting person, they don't know equity, they don't know all these benchmarks. And so you're just kind of flying blind. And they're like, you know, trust me, you're going to get X. But you actually spell out, here's what you need to ask for. My question to kick this off is, why don't companies, why don't startups, like, why isn't that in my offer letter? Why don't they spell out all the things that you have in your post as things to ask for? Why wouldn't they do that?

Yeah, so, I mean, look, some companies are starting to do it, but this is the thing that makes me so crazy. It's like you're not given enough information to evaluate your own compensation. And it's crazy. And so I think the why is twofold. I think one, I think sometimes even founders and definitely recruiters don't understand how to communicate this stuff. Like, yes, they've raised money and they understand that you need an option pool, which is where the employee equity comes out of. And they kind of understand, like, how this VC valuation that sets the preferred price, which is basically the price that VCs pay per preferred share. And I had this strike price that's set by this 409A valuation, which is what employees have to pay for it. But sometimes they just don't know how to articulate it. And I think that's surprising to people that founders don't know how to articulate it. But I've had lots of conversations with founders where they're like, help me articulate this. So I think, one, that's the other thing. And two, I think it's also, they think it's in their best interest to not explain it. They think like, if it's a black box, people aren't going to ask other questions, they're not going to be able to compare it. And it's hard enough to compare equity and then when you don't have the right information, you really can't compare it. And I think employee savviness on equity has gone up. I mean, that was one of our goals at carta, was to help employees be more savvy about it. Like, there's lots of companies putting out a lot of great things on equity. So I think as employee savviness goes up, it's a competitive advantage to explain to people how equity works. And I think it's a huge red flag when companies will not give you key information about compensation or about equity specifically. As an example, I recently heard from someone that they got an offer where it just said equity TBD based on the next round like we're raising around. So it's tbd, that's not a thing. If it's tbd, that's not good. And what can be TBD is your strike price because there is a time when you can be in limbo on what the strike price is because companies are getting these 409 A valuations which are required to set the strike price primarily for tax reasons, things like that. So there is a time when you don't know your strike price, but you can always ask for what was the last strike price. And there is a time where our valuation is about to go up. Then what was the valuation before you started raising this round? What are you targeting? There's still things you can ask. But equity, tbd, not a thing. But yeah, our post really outlines what information you need to have to evaluate equity and then the like different ways you can evaluate equity.

I just add that I think that if a company won't share that information, it's a huge red flag as the candidate. I actually wrote a post about this when I was at Scalar because I was so impressed with the way that they did the hiring process where they made sure that every candidate knew all this information. And I think if a company especially is like, oh, we're very transparent as a culture, look at the way they manage the hiring process. If they won't share this information with you that is relevant to your actual bottom line compensation, they are not a transparent company. Actions speak a heck of a lot louder than words on this stuff. And so if they won't share this stuff, it's only going to get worse when you get there. And so I would just be like, as a marketer or any employee, like pay attention to what they're, what they're sharing and what they're not. Because if they won't share it with you, you don't have the full information. And then you can't make an educated decision about whether it's where you want to go.

Especially if people are getting smarter about this, it's in your best interest to share that. But I think it's also important to talk about. Let's talk about equity for a second though. Equity is not cash, it is not a guaranteed thing. And so is it an important part of your decision? Yes. Do you want upside, what are you taking this role for? But I also think it's important in what you talk about with it being a marketer's market. Cash is always going to work. And so you shouldn't be getting low balled on some salary because you're getting this equity package. And I think what I see when I'm looking at your stuff, it's like there is a mix and you can get a mix of both. But I'm just curious to hear your philosophy because it's not a guarantee. You could have X percent and you can go through all this, but there should still be big red letters on that offer letter that FYI, you could also leave this company in X years and pay a bunch of money and exercise all your shares and you could lose money. I know a handful of people who have done that and lost money at other companies. And so like that also I feel like should be a headline in this.

Yeah, a couple of things on that. Oftentimes people will encourage you, and this advice has merit, to exercise your options as early as you can. And like we as advisors always ask for early exercise so we can exercise right away, but that's a little different because we have equity.

Wait, can we pause on that for one second? Even you saying that is going to be an insight for a lot of people because how many candidates on the way in know that, oh, I could have been early exercising? Like that's another one of those things in the checklist of things companies should be proactive about telling you about.

So let me, let me, let me dive in a little bit more there. And then I want to also talk about like the flip side of that was how much time you have to exercise your options when you leave. So there the benefit of exercising options right away or having early exercise, which you can ask for, you won't always get it, but you can ask for it. The benefit of this is that when the strike price changes so your strike price will always stay the same. Like you come in at a dollar, like you're always going to have to pay a dollar for those shares, but it will go up for new people that join. And the delta between the strike price when you exercise and the strike price when you join, like that's what you're taxed based on when you exercise.

And you will get tax on that whether you have made a dollar from that company yet or not.

Right. So I'm not going to go like, not a tax professional. Not like. But that's why people early exercise because the Taxes are based on that, Del. So if you early exercise, you can avoid that. That said, another big advantage besides early exercise is the ability to exercise your shares long after you leave. For instance, when I was at asana, we had 10 years to exercise our options. Most companies give you 90 days. Here's why that matters. Within 90 days. First of all, after you leave, you have to come up with the cash to do that. That can be hard to do. Second of all, you might not have any idea if the company's gonna be successful when you have more than 90 days. Like 10 years, you can wait and see. So transparently, like, on most of my Asana equity, I had business school loans. Like, I waited, I waited until they went public and I sold or bought and sold on the same day. And yes, that has major tax implications, but I took on no risk with that money. So there's lots of ways to do this and you can spread out how you exercise, but both of these things are advantages. Early exercise is advantage if you have the money to buy them upfront for tax purposes. And an extended exercise window when you leave is a huge thing. Like, I would take substantially less equity to have that option. Especially early on in your career when it's really difficult to outlay that cash and to take on that risk. If you take all of your savings and you put it into exercising one company's options and then they have a down round or they go nowhere, like, that's really shitty. So asking about that exercise window, and I think it is becoming more commonplace to give extended windows. Ten years is the upper end of the range, but like one year, two years, that kind of thing is a huge advantage on equity.

Even a year would be good.

Even a year, yeah.

This is great. I'm learning a bunch. It's almost like in a marketer's hiring market, the dream company is not just one that has a vision and you believe in the product, but it's almost like the sec, okay, the progression in dating is like, but are they transparent about equity? Check. Do they have early exercise? Check. Do they have extended exercise window? Check. And you're like, wow, the attractiveness of this company is growing because of the financial freedom that it's going to allow me beyond, like, why I was excited about the product. Like, if you have two companies, one of them gives you all that information, the other one doesn't. Aren't you going to kind of be like, I'm going to. At least I know what I'm getting into.

It's a huge advantage for Employers to get this information. But the other thing I'll say is, all of this aside, what matters the most with equity is picking a winner. And like that's what matters the most. So all of these things are great, but you should be doing that diligence anyway and like making sure there's a vision, making sure the founders can execute quickly and make decisions quickly and are fit with the market. Like all of the things that people look for when they're investing in companies you should be looking for.

So I like, would you be more willing to put up with bullshit if you knew? Like let's say it was like early stripe and you can't get all this information. But like it's stripe and like I have. The salary is good, the equity is okay, but it's a little bit of mystery. Would you, would you put up with that? Like how do you. Well, obviously now we know it's Stripe.

But yeah, we didn't know.

I think any company should give you the information on the equity of like what percent ownership you have. You shouldn't take an offer if you don't know that. But if they won't give you early exercise or an extended window and it's stripe, I'd probably still take the stripe job because those are more like nice to haves than picking a company that's not going to go anywhere. And you have all those great things, but then the equity is essentially worthless.

Table stakes is knowing the shares outstanding and knowing the preferred price in addition to the information they give you, which is shares and strike price. You need to know the preferred price and you need to know the shares outstanding. And there's lots of information about this in our newsletter. That's table stakes. Then. The most important thing is that this company has what it takes to be successful. And then what's most important after that is these bonuses like early exercise and a long post termination exercise window. That's how I would rank them.

That's great. And you have all this stuff in your posts. People are going to be pulling over on the side of the road and taking notes. But don't do that because we have this link. You can look at it when you get home. I promise.

Don't do that.

Yeah, please don't do that. But let's actually talk to marketers now. If we had to recap this because there's a lot of people get benefit from the employee side, but there's also a lot of marketing leaders, CMOs here who are trying to build their own marketing team. How can you become a better hirer in this scenario, I guess. What can you be doing in your role as a CMO marketing leader to push your company to bring transparency into this process?

This is on that topic, but I want to say something first around. If you have a bad experience as a cmo, getting your compensation to be right and you're like, I'm just so excited about the company, but I'm going to take low compensation. First of all, don't do that. I've been there. Don't do it. Second of all, imagine how hard it is going to be for you to hire, especially right now. So I think another thing to think about as a senior leader being hired is that you are then going to have to hire. So if your candidate experience was shitty, if your comp is was a nightmare to get to just a competitive level, it's going to be really hard for you to hire. So it's something to consider when you're joining. Don't just think about how that experience is for you and how the compensation situation worked out for you. Remember, you have to hire.

Well. Yeah. Because if you're, it's a great point. If you're the hiring manager, it's the ceiling. They'll be asking you the question. They're going to be like, okay, great, yeah, I'm down, Kathleen, I'm down. You're my boss, you're going to be the cmo, but can you give me some more information about my equity? And then the CMOs can be like.

Yeah, or like mine's bad too. Yeah.

Like if you're, if you're the CMO and your comp is low, your whole.

Team'S comp is going to be low.

So you set the ceiling and you set the bar for what the team can get. So I think that's an important point.

That Emily just made. Yeah. Especially right now. So that's like my big thing on hiring is like remember when you are taking the job as ad marketing that you're going to have to do a ton of hiring. Like that is your job. In fact, like that's the main thing that you're doing is hiring and managing effective teams. So if you're not on have the tools from the company to do that, like you have a problem. Kathleen, do you want to take the actual question that Dave asked around how to hire as a head of marketing?

Sure. We mentor a lot of first time heads of marketing. So we spend a lot of time helping marketers think through this. And a lot of the advice and Emily feel Free to chime in after I go through sort of the advice that I typically give one is you have to carve out time to actually recruit. So I think a lot of marketers, marketing leaders are like, okay, I know I need to build out my team. But then they get so bogged down in the day to day that I'm like, they're like, I'm having a hard time hiring. I'm like, okay, how much time did you spend on it this week? And it's like, oh, I didn't do anything. It's like, okay, well that's why you.

Didn'T move the needle.

So you need to actually carve out time on your calendar. What I found helpful is like, you know, put an hour, you know, the beginning of the week, at the end of the week at least to do sourcing, to do outreach to, you know, make sure that you are building your pipeline of candidates so that you can actually hire.

It's like if you were like a hungry, if you were like a hungry AE at that company, how deep you'd be on LinkedIn. And then like the CMO doesn't like, you should know everyone at every company in your industry. Who's the content person there, who's the social person there, who's the marketing manager. There's got to be like that level of knowledge, right?

And you should, yeah, you need to source. And even if you have a recruiting team or recruiters helping you, you still need to source and supplement and do your own outreach. So I think that's really important. Another thing that I, that we sort of talked about earlier, I think that you build your team piece by piece. And so oftentimes people are like, I need to hire these five roles. You need to prioritize. You need to prioritize one or two roles. It's way too hard to hire five roles at a time. And it's actually not smart because each hire that you bring onto the team is going to change who the next hire is. And so focus on your one to two most important hires. Get them in the door, see what their skills are, what are their strengths, what are their areas that you know, you need to cover with the next hire. And so I think that's an important thing. I've talked to so many marketers who are like, I've got five reps. It's like, okay, let's narrow it down one or two. Pick one or two to focus on and actually get them in the door.

Because I see true, I see it all the time. Like the Market leader will just like, boom, just shotgun six new jobs on the jobs page and then be like, frustrated that something's not happening. I think you're so right about the. It forces you to focus. Like, what's the one role you need to get right now? But it also, you're so right about the DNA of the team, like, continuing to evolve based on who you hire.

Right.

And then I think you, as a marketing leader need to sell, you know, the vision and the team and how you're thinking about it. And a lot of people who are joining an early stage company, I think the biggest thing you can sell them on is the impact that they have and how this is a progression in their career. So be able to tell that career story. Like, why would you leave your job? You're probably happy in to some extent and come join you. Like, you need to be a great recruiter as a head of marketing, and if you can't recruit, you're not gonna be able to build a team and you're. And you're not gonna be able to sort of build a company. And so I think everyone needs to be a recruiter. And if I were a CEO interviewing a CMO or VP of marketing, I would ask them, how do you hire? Because if they can't do that, they can't grow the team, then the company can't really grow.

And this is like the missing piece for, like, marketers rising through their career too. It's like, maybe you're a great marketer. If you want to become CMO marketing leader, you got to be able to, like, now you've done the great marketing, the next thing you have to prove is, can you build a team? Can you lead, can you manage, can you hire, can you recruit?

A couple things to just add or emphasize that. Kathleen said, like, it is very much like the. And I was taking notes on paper this time, Dave. I wasn't just scribbling. Like, I actually took notes during slunch.

Scribbling down, like, what you're going to have for lunch after this thing.

No, I was literally just like, drawing scribbles because I can't sit still. Kathleen can vouch that that's most likely what I'm doing. So I've got like, toys over here. I can't sit still. So it's like the era of the personal brand right now. And so you, as a marketing leader need to have a personal brand within marketing. You don't need to go amass like 50,000 Twitter followers. But, like, you need to be out there, like sharing on LinkedIn what's exciting about the company. Like, you need to be the company's champion. Like you need to be someone that people want to work for, whatever that is for you. It's different for everyone what that looks like, but like you need to be compelling. I think also, like, it is important to focus on a couple of roles, but it's also important to be opportunistic. If you meet someone, it isn't one of those roles but you know you will meet them in six months. Like if you're hiring for product marketing and that's your priority and a great content marketer comes through the door and you don't have a great content marketer yet, scoop up that content marketer, even if that wasn't the role you were planning to hire for. So focus on some roles but be open to opportunistic hires because you're going to need them eventually and switching around that order.

I totally agree with that, Emily. I actually did that when I was at Scalar. I was hiring like a corporate marketer and ended up interviewing this guy who after talking to him I was like, you're a product marketer. And I was also looking for, you know, mid level product marketer. He was more senior and I was like, I will hire you at whatever level you are. He ended up being one of my best hires, but it was, you know, interviewing for him for a different role and being flexible enough to say, hey, actually I think you're better for this other role and would love to have you join the company and join the team.

The best people I've hired, I always made up roles for them. Like literally everyone that I hired, like they didn't fit a job description. That's the best people that I've hired.

So true. Yeah, because you meet. Oh, I met Emily. Well, we kind of have somebody doing this. We kind of have somebody doing this, but I think Emily's going to go and own this and it's so much more about this gut. I love how you both talked about you have a hiring plan, but you're opportunistic hire. I saw this opportunistic hire or got connected to this person or this person is no longer at the company. You also talked about building your brand as a CMO and you don't have to do it for the vanity, for the likes. But I want to double click on what you said because I think it's so important. Do you have to be on LinkedIn if you're a B2B SaaS CMO? No. Does it give you an advantage when recruiting and hiring? 100%. And so if that's your goal, why not lean into that and why not use your LinkedIn page to like, I've actually now seen your name before and I might actually want to go work for you and. Wow. I've been following her on, on LinkedIn for three months. This CMO, this marketing leader seems like an awesome person. I think that stuff really does matter and I don't know why you wouldn't want to play in that stream today.

Yeah. And look, even if you write content and only a few people read it, in some ways that's about getting your thoughts down so you can share that with candidates so they get who you are and what you're about. So I think you need to have a way for candidates to want to work for you. And again, it's whatever variety works for you and whatever feels natural for you and what you're doing. Like, if you're a growth marketer and you don't want to write things like put out a great template, like put out a great template, share the template. Like whatever it is doesn't matter. But figure out what you're really great at in marketing and then do something to build a brand around it. Like you're a marketer. So like, you've got to be good at that.

Like share your share what you're doing in marketing at your org. I think that's what's like, interesting to people like us. Like, we want, like I'd want to see that.

Yeah.

Okay.

We could go for hours.

Any closing thoughts that we didn't get to that before I wrap us up and I'll plug MKT1 and all that stuff. But any last minute thoughts before we wrap up?

Yeah, I think so. Kathleen and I, in addition to all the things we do for founders and companies, one of our big goals is to champion the marketer. So we have a couple of ways of doing that. We make time in our schedules to coach people one on one on finding their next job. We don't have a ton of slots for that, but like we have a form on our website in the marketer section where you can like fill out what you're looking for and we can, we help, we help a handful of people every month. Second, we also have a forum for marketers who are interested in angel investing if you're an accredited investor, which just means you hit certain thresholds on income and net worth, or net worth, I should say. And so we help share opportunities for angel investing with. With marketers. So, you know, if you feel like you need some support, like in. In your marketing career, wanted to get to the next level, like, we probably have something to help you out and that's something that's really important to us.

Yeah, I'll just echo. I mean, we, we started our business to sort of help elevate the role of marketing, I think, within companies because we firmly believe that at this point, you know, a good product is sort of table stakes and marketing is really going to be a big differentiator for companies going forward. And so a lot of the work that we do is really helping to support the ecosystem and of marketers, particularly startup marketers, because it can be a challenging job, but we think it's one of the most rewarding jobs too. And so our goal is to sort of be that support to help elevate that role.

I love it. Congratulations on what you're building. I think it's definitely real. The you can hear the deep knowledge that you both have and passion for this. And if people are listening, I would love it if you went to MKT1CO and I want you to flood Emily and Kathleen with new requests for mentorship because this is one of the most popular, most common things that comes up and it's really cool to see people like both of you with your backgrounds building something awesome in this space. So thank you. Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate you coming on my part. My podcast to chat a little bit. I know this will be helpful for people, but anything else I'm missing, mkt1co and then obviously we'll link to your stuff. Connect with Emily and Kathleen on LinkedIn.

Sounds great. Thanks, Steve. Have the rest of your day.

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you both.

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