Katie Stanton (Founder at Moxie Ventures, ex VP of Global Media/International at Twitter)

Hi everyone.

This is Jackson Steger. I'm a producer on the show and I'm really excited for you all to hear today's episode with guest Katie Stanton. Before we get started, some quick context. Katie used to work at Twitter, and so we talk about her time at Twitter during the episode. Our discussion was a few weeks ago. It happened right before Elon Musk expressed his interest in buying Twitter. And I think that's just helpful context to have as you listen to the discussion.

Thanks. Hey everyone, this is Erik Torenberg and you're listening to Execs by On Deck. Execs is a show for founders, operators, and leaders who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. Our guests are tech execs in key roles at top tech companies who share their hard-won, earned secrets on how to scale faster. Katie Stanton is the founder and general partner of Moxie Ventures. Previously, she was a vice president at Twitter, chief marketing officer at Color, and a principal at Google. She's also held positions at the Obama White House and Clinton State Department. In this episode, Katie shares playbooks for understanding market development, creating content flywheels, and how to build a marketing organization. So Katie, the first question I ask everyone who comes onto this podcast is when you look back at the arc of your career and the different decisions that you've made from Twitter to Color to the White House to Google, What is sort of the thread that you've kept pulling, or the thread that ties your different experiences together and helps you make sense of how you've chosen to spend your career?

Yeah, I think with all of these things, I have this rubric that I've worked through, and looking back, it makes sense, but at the time, it never made sense. But the rubric of really 4 things: who are the people that you're working for? Is this a product that you love? Are you proud of that work? And can you make a positive impact? And in each place I've worked at, I've been lucky enough to have worked with great people and building great products and being really proud of these things. And with each new opportunity, it's like, well, could this be better? Could I raise the bar? Could I keep doing that? And often the case is yes, but in doing so, it's risky and it can be very scary, but that's okay. And actually, if you're not scared a little bit, You might not be pushing yourself enough.

Totally. And how have you chosen where to gain expertise and where to double down, not just where you worked, but in what role and what position? Why don't you give a little bit of your background in terms of what you did at the different places?

I think a lot of it is trial and error, and it is pursuing things that you want to get better at and finding those mentorship opportunities and those learning organizations that can help you just be a better version of yourself, but also being realistic. Like, you just might not be good at something, and that's okay. And stop kind of, you know, really struggling so hard. So, for example, when I was at Google, I was lucky enough to be a product manager there. But Google, at the time, and maybe still is, very particular about who can be a product manager, and you have to have a CS background, which I do not have. And I realized I was a pretty good product manager, but I was capped in my growth there. Because I didn't have a CS background, and I certainly wasn't going to get one in my late 20s, and it just was going to be too hard. So I kind of wiggled around a little bit and found a better strength for myself to develop, which was more in sort of biz dev and partnerships and new business development and marketing. And so I started to pursue my strengths.

Yeah. Let's talk about your time at Twitter. Talk about how you worked your way up to vice president and kind of the various different Twitter was a job of a lifetime.

I loved the product. I loved the team. I loved the people, and I felt so lucky. The funny story is I almost joined in 2008, right after Google. I knew Ev Williams and I pitched him why I should work there. He's like, well, I'm not really looking for people like you, but thanks. But he was very nice about it and we stayed in touch. Then I started to interview, but then I had this fork in the road where I had an opportunity to go work for President Obama. So, I did that. I had to do that. So, I went out to DC for a couple of years, but after doing that, I realized, you know, I really love Twitter. I really love this product and people and something I'll be proud of. So, I called Ev back up and Dick Costolo had joined as well and said, do you happen to have another role for me? And they're like, yes. Now we need somebody to think through international. How do we grow and scale this business around the world? I mean, dream come true. 20-year-old Katie, who had studied international relations and couldn't find a job anything like this, would have been so happy and proud. And so, moved back to California. And that role was just so interesting. It was such a blank slate. There was so much positive energy, so many great people, so much opportunity. You would see sort of the geopolitical usage of Twitter. You could see nonprofits using Twitter. You could see famous people using Twitter and all these different use cases, which were so vibrant and interesting. So it was a job of a lifetime.

I worked on international for What was it like when you would start new markets? Is it just sort of rinse and repeat, or how different are these different markets? What did that mean for starting them for Twitter?

Yeah, we had this generic content flywheel that if we could get the Barack Obama, the Steph Curry, the Beyoncé, the Ellen DeGeneres when she was cool, if we can get the New York Times and all these different types of content creators in each market, generally speaking, the flywheel would start to work and we would get some good content going. We tried to always get the head of state. We would always try to get the main news organizations. For the most part, it worked, but there were some markets, like in any product, that are quirky. The hardest market for us was Germany. Germany was the bane of my existence. We had to win Germany. We had to win it early. It's the 4th largest economy in Europe. It's such a big one. I don't even know where it ranks in the world, but it's pretty big and we knew we had to nail And Germans just were not interested. I mean, I was determined to get Angela Merkel on Twitter, and so much so that we ended up renting our first office for Twitter Germany in her apartment building because I wanted her to pass the Twitter bird every day. Didn't work. And Germans are just, you know, they're slower to adopt a lot of these newer technologies at the time. Now it seems old, but they're more cautious and we needed to find different ways. And we also just had to be patient. And Japan was a completely different market. market too because it just grew on its own. Japan is a funky, really fun market. I lived in Japan after college, so I had some familiarity with it, but it's a winner-take-all market. Japanese customers, they loved the product. They loved it really early. We couldn't really prove this at the time, but we thought, well, maybe it's because in Japanese you have the kanji characters and you can squeeze in a whole essay in 140 characters, which were at the time And in Germany, in German language, like 140 characters is like a word. You can't really say anything. So maybe, you know, there's something to do about language. So the sociologists will know more about that. But each market is, you know, a little bit quirky, but it's so fun to go out there and just try to understand it better.

Yeah. And then what was your— the next role like in terms of what did you focus on and what was your mandate?

So my initial role as international and market development kind of evolved naturally into global media, which was trying to strengthen our partnerships around the world with talent, with sports organizations, with governments and politicians about how people are going to use Twitter with TV. We had this real-time TV and Twitter integrations as you're watching live TV, as we did last night. We saw the Oscars, and wow, that was something. How do you integrate all the content that people are talking about online into real-time TV. So that was really interesting and fun. And it was just working with people around the world that were just so talented. I mean, they're some of my best friends to this day. And it's just a really, you know, an interesting platform to work on that is always in the moment.

Yeah. And remains as much, you know, a decade later or even more maybe. I'm curious if you had all the knowledge about how the world has evolved and how Twitter has evolved, since you were working at Twitter and you can go back a decade and tell yourself and everyone else at Twitter, hey, this is where the future is going for Twitter, but also just generally, what would you have told the team in terms of— obviously Twitter has been very successful already, but what would you go tell yourself or go tell Twitter in terms of what could have been done differently?

Well, selfishly, I would probably tell myself 10 years ago to work harder at getting the edit button because I really think Twitter should have an edit button. So I hope Kayvon is listening. I think Twitter has been and continues to be led by amazing, high-integrity, high-performing people. Vijay Gade, I think, is one of the best humans on the planet. She remains the Chief Legal Officer and has been this North Star for the company in terms of doing the right thing. And that's hard. It's really, really hard. And people can have their complaints about companies and freedom of expression, all these things, but can you imagine being the person or the team responsible for These sort of evolving, innovative solutions. I mean, these things, it's not like you could go back and say, well, here's precedent. This is what happened. Here's what the other 5 companies did before. You're always on the forefront of this high-wire decision-making. So, I'm encouraged by the continued leadership, by the evolution of the platform, and the continued conversations that still happen there.

Totally. Talk about some of the— one or two of the main learnings that you took away from Twitter besides what we've discussed so far.

I think the main learning at Twitter, and frankly everywhere I've ever worked, is just really knowing your customer, empathizing with your customer, supporting your customer, and being authentic with your customer. I think Jack did a great job of really understanding His customers around the world. I think Dick Costolo did a great job doing these things too. I think they have done a really amazing job of customer obsession, support, owning up when you get things wrong, because you will. We all do. I think those are some of the biggest lessons.

Totally. What do you mean when you say first hire in market? Yes.

When we were growing at Twitter in each of the markets, We are not experts. We are American, we're based in San Francisco, and we need to hire local people who understand the markets and can build community, know their customers, and be empathetic. It was our job to hire the first person who would be that Twitter ambassador to represent Twitter in Germany, Twitter in Japan, Twitter in France, and so on. There wasn't sort of a cookie-cutter mold. Some organizations look for that first salesperson, some people look for that first product And I think maybe I'm biased because I had worked at the State Department and had a bias towards ambassadors, but I felt like there's an ambassador in each market that can pull together the cross-functional team and be that representative. Because when things go bad, and they will, and there's a 3:00 AM call, and all of a sudden we're going to have to make an urgent real-time decision in France or Germany or Brazil, wherever it may be, that we won't know the answers to it from San Francisco. So we had to find people that we trusted who could be that first leader. So, for example, in Germany, we hired a guy named Rowan Barnett who was amazing. And he came from a more, you know, eclectic background in nonprofit and business development. And he's a natural ambassador. He speaks, I think, 5 or 6 languages. And he just was wonderful and did a great job building the company from ground zero.

Yeah, that's awesome. I want to segue to your time at Color, which is a very different company than Twitter. How did you think about making that transition and thinking about, you know, building Color's brand from the ground up?

Well, it's funny, when I left Twitter, I had no idea what I was going to do, and I was terrified because we're trained to go from job to job to job and always to know what's next. And at the time, I had a lot of personal stuff going on. I had some family members who were very sick and I needed a fresh break. And I also— it's harder as you grow, especially if you're an executive at a company, to just start interviewing. It felt so disloyal and I didn't want to just start talking to other companies and have to get back to my team. It just felt bad. So, I opted for the clean break. In retrospect, I'm so glad I did. And I would encourage everybody to do that if you can because it doesn't mean that you got fired.

Right.

you got pushed out or anything like that. It means that you are confident enough in your options and you're investing in yourself and you're investing in time. And sometimes we need time. So I took some time to think about what was next. And my good friends, Othman Laraki and Elad Gil, who I'd worked with at Google and then Twitter, and they had started Color and I was a personal angel investor, they approached me and said, hey, would you like to be the chief marketing officer for Color? And I was like, you two are the smartest guys I know, and this is the stupidest idea you've ever come up with because I don't know anything about healthcare. I don't know anything about genetics. I've actually never been a marketer. And so, I felt like I was 0 for 3. And they just kind of shrugged and said, well, you'll figure it out and why don't you just come? And, you know, they're kind of sneaky, like, just come and consult a couple days a week. Of course, I come and consult a couple days a week. I'm like, I love everybody here and I love this mission and I love this team. And again, going back to like do things that are hard and that push you. The right direction. So, I joined the team and it was amazing. It was such— this was probably the biggest learning experience of my career, starting from ground zero. So, I had to learn the industry, I had to learn the function, and I was fortunate to just be surrounded by so many other smart people who gave me the runway and the feedback, good and bad, to do the job. So, I was at Color for about 3 years and we made a lot of progress. I'm thrilled to see how Hoffman has taken the company to a whole new level. So now they have raised, I think, their Series D, and they're off to the races supporting a lot of people in healthcare.

That's awesome. Talk about what that learning curve was like for the function. How did you get up to speed? What did you decide to learn? What did you decide to say, hey, I'll outsource that, or I'll hire for this, or I won't focus on this? How did you think about that?

The first thing I did was just kind of learn and talking to people I had a lot of admiration for. And I had worked with Sundar Pichai at Google, and I had reached out to him and said, Sundar, who is the best marketer you had ever worked with? And he very quickly responded, Erik Antonow, talk to him. So, I talked to Erik. Erik would coach me every Friday. We would have coffee in the Color office and we would just talk about marketing principles. And not to oversimplify it, but it came down to a couple of things. Again, knowing your customer. Who are we serving and why? You know, second, thinking through like, what are our guiding principles and what are the voices that resonate? And really being thoughtful about that. There's brands that can be funny, obviously not in healthcare. But for us it was, we had to be credible, we had to be trustworthy, we had to be approachable, we had to be human, we had to be smart. So just thinking through what are even the tones and the values that we had, and then just going through the mechanics. Okay, there's awareness and inspiration, there's consideration, there's conversion and loyalty and advocacy and all these mechanical things. And then the number one thing that you always do in any company is you hire someone smarter than you. And so I just was on this fast mission to figure out like, okay, who are those marketers that are far smarter than me and more capable? I'll hire them and then get out of their way. And so I just went on another mission, very similar to Twitter, which was like hiring people who could really run a particular market. And running people who could run a particular mission at Color.

Yeah. And what's been— what have you found most effective or non-obvious in hiring those marketers or hiring those people when you were at Twitter? Was it just the strength of your network? Was it any unorthodox sourcing or conversion practices? Or what have you learned about hiring?

I think the main thing I've learned about hiring is trust. Trust in judgment, trust in ethics, trust in grit. Especially when you're hiring internationally, that you're not there every day. And now we live in this remote world, right? So, you have to trust people to use their time well and to make really good decisions. And then the second thing is getting out of people's way. I loved hiring people who I felt were on their way up. Sure, they might not have been the VP at blah-de-blah company or whatever and may have had this title, but You know, it was more about potential than it was about pedigree. And I think that's always a practice that works well, both as an operator, as hiring, and also as an investor when investing.

Yeah, totally. I want to talk about those 2 things and go deeper into them as you saw them at Color. Why don't you talk about how you identified who your first customer, initial customer should be, and then how you thought about reaching them, or what was most effective, or what channels you experimented with, et cetera?

Yeah, it was a really interesting evolution. And I came in somewhat biased of like, oh, well, everyone's going to want to know their genetic blueprint, right? It's basically like this physical blueprint of your life and what you're predisposed to, and everyone will want to know that. Well, no, is the answer.

Why?

It's scary. And at the time, you know, our product was really focused on women who might be at risk of breast and ovarian cancer. So that really narrowed things down a lot. And then what I started to do is just really go on this listening tour of especially women who had suffered from these cancers due to genetic predispositions. And so talking to those customers and seeing how being informed has helped them improve their lives, earlier detection, help break the cycle. Of breast cancer in their family by working with their doctors to get their sisters and their brothers and their children and everybody tested. So they just know what they're dealing with. And the more time I spent with those families who would just tell us their stories, the more I realized, you know, how grateful I was to them for their time. And in fact, it just kind of changed the way I thought about marketing that, well, I'm just going to use their language. I'm going to— like, instead of me thinking of some clever Byline, I'm just going to use, you know, what Kelly suggested and what Sharon said in her testimonial. And so, you know, customer testimonials just became something so integral to the work that we were doing because people see themselves in others and, and it's just much more authentic and real.

Yeah, that's really interesting. Did you find that there were specific channels that converted best or did you experiment with certain ones?

Yes. So, it was really interesting as you look at a lot of early-stage companies and you're developing your marketing channels and sometimes you just don't know, so you have to try a couple of them. And so, the typical ones, ones that we tried were consumer, providers, working with different doctors' offices, enterprise, and then population health. And consumers, we tried really hard and we made an impact, but consumer D2C at the time, I think, is very hard. We're seeing some breakouts and a lot of success in things like birth control or taboo types of things, if it's hair loss or STDs, whatever it may be. So that makes a lot of sense in D2C healthcare, but genetics is just different. And 23andMe and Ancestry are very different products, so that also behaved differently. We found a lot of success in enterprise, so looking at color as an employee benefit We worked with Salesforce and Levi's and a lot of great organizations who provided this for free. And the testimonials that we had from employers were like, oh my gosh, I can't believe my company paid for this. This changed my life. You know, we had one example of a woman whose husband's company actually offered it, and she was just kind of like, oh, okay, I'll take this. And she took it and was BRCA positive and thought, well, that's interesting. We don't have any kind of cancer in our family, but let me share this with, you know, my mom and my sister. And her mother went in and took the test, also BRCA positive. And the doctor said, well, why don't you just come in? Let's just do a little check and see what's going on. Turns out that she was in early-stage ovarian cancer. Changed her life. So those types of stories were just so meaningful and so inspiring to us. And then population health was the last channel. Which had a ton of success. And I think that's where— it's been a while since I've talked to the team, but my understanding is that that's enormously successful for Color today and just being able to reach so many more customers at scale. Yeah.

I want to talk about the enterprise approach because my understanding is, you know, you, Elad, Hoffman, you know, very well connected. And so you were able to, you know, go from the top in many areas, I'm sure. What about for companies that aren't as well connected? Like, could they have been as successful doing that? Or what's, what's important to get right when going through the enterprise?

Yeah, warm intros do help. I won't lie. But I do think it's very possible. So I think the trick is, one, find warm intros when you can, 2, to make sure you have a product that can serve a population pretty easily, and that it's something that has a lot of demand or can really help a lot of people with some Consumer education, for example. The challenge right now, I think, for a lot of founders, and this was different when we were doing this, I guess, 5 years ago or 6 years ago, is that it didn't feel as crowded. It's so crowded now. I see a lot of pitches where people are like, yeah, we're going to be an employee benefit. I'm like, oh my gosh, these poor HR managers. How are they going to decide? There's just so much going on. One other angle to look at too, if possible, Are finding those aggregators of benefits. So the Sequoias of the world, or even Justworks and Workday, and trying to find ways, you know, these platforms that support a lot of employee populations at scale, how do you make it just easier for them to, you know, serve their customers in turn?

Yeah, totally. How did you think about the brand at Color and just the process? Did you do it all internal? Did you work with an agency? How did you work with them? That's something we're working on right now at On Deck, or just starting to think about. How did you think about that at Color and how did it evolve during your time there?

By the way, congrats on all things On Deck. I am such a big fan. I'm so proud of you. I think this is super awesome. Every team I've seen graduating or involved with or touching On Deck is just really inspiring. So just a quick shout out for everything you've done. Yeah, outsourcing your brand is hard. I don't know anyone who has had that much success outsourcing their brand until they get to a different level where you have an idea of your brand and you just need more arms and legs to have more iterations or reflections of it, like in ads. So at Color, we did it all internally. We really had such a great group of people to help us do that. And from time to time, we would hire consultants to just kind of check maybe some language. And we did hire an agency at one point and work with them and were just kind of wowed by all the different ideas and clever marketing ideas. And then we tested it and it didn't work nearly as good as what we had produced internally. That was kind of like hokey-pokey. Like, you know, we would like hire a video guy to help us with some testimonials and we would add our own music. And, you know, it was kind of a very basic team, but for whatever reason, that's what resonated. And we realized, you know what, like, let's play our strengths, which is authenticity and we're just not ready. And I think That's true for a lot of startups too, as you think about very specific areas of help like PR agencies or marketing agencies, that one, you need to make sure you've kind of defined your voice and your values first. And then second, you need to make sure that you have a stakeholder at your company that can own this. So, it can't be the CEO is working with a PR agency. She or he has to manage that PR agency. They don't have time for that. So you have to have that PR person inside or marketing person or maybe that Jill or Jack of all trades that can manage it. So you have to have someone really owning it. And then third, right-sizing it. So you don't want to be a small little startup and then all of a sudden hire some major PR agency or major marketing agency because you're going to be the least important client. So maybe finding some up-and-comer agencies and you're maybe one of their, like, maybe you don't want to be the first client, but maybe you're like the 5th or 6th and you like the other ones. And so you're kind of on par with each other, you know what I mean? And so you can each help each other get to the next level.

Totally. Let's talk about it from the founder perspective of hiring a CMO. My sense is that you were hired fairly early for a company history as a CMO. We still don't have a CMO. When should a founder look to bring on a CMO? And what should a founder look for in a CMO? Should they be more open to people like yourself who've been executives but didn't have that formal marketing experience? Although you're modest, are you a bit of an exception in this case? Should people look for more people with marketing experience? What's your take there?

I may have a weird take, which is if you're a founder at seed, A, maybe even B, You're not ready for a CMO. You don't deserve a CMO. You're not ready for it. You really have to get sort of the work right at the beginning. It's almost like, especially a lot of traditional CMOs, and myself included, all of a sudden you go to these companies and you're going to need a team, you're going to need a budget, and you don't have a team or budget until you get to at least late Series A, maybe B. So, the first hire I personally have a bias towards for early-stage companies is finding a great PMM. A PMM, a product marketing manager, who's kind of similar to a product manager. You know how to build, but somebody who's great at details, somebody who's great at communication, someone who's great at team coordination. This is really hard, but getting people that are both quantitative and qualitative. Somebody who has really great instinct on the products, Somebody who has a lot of attention to the customer. Again, knowing your customer, being empathetic with the customer, spending probably 20% of their days really listening to customer feedback and looking at emails and watching videos or talking with customers directly. Finding that great PMM, I think, is really, really important at seed, at Series A. There are a couple of companies that I think have done this really well. Again, admitting my bias, I think Google has done a very good job of grooming a community of PMMs. Netflix is really good. LinkedIn is really good. Shannon Stuboe, who is a CMO there, is one of the greatest of all time and super fave. So I'd really focus on just getting the marketing hub right and then bringing on a CMO perhaps later on in the evolution of the company.

And for that PMM, is it important that they have prior PMM experience or what do you look for in that?

I think so. I think it's good for somebody to be plucked from one of these places that has been very well trained, who has pattern matched quite a bit, that has seen a lot. Sometimes you could get lucky and find somebody who just doesn't have that experience, but I think it's good, especially if the founders themselves don't have any marketing experience or PMM experience, to find somebody who does. And yeah, just understanding those best practices at the get-go.

Yeah, that makes sense. Let's dive deeper into what that marketing hub or team looks like. So we start with the first hire is the PMM. What do you think founders should look to build from there? What does it look like to build a team out?

I think once you have the flickers of product-market fit, of course, finding that growth marketer and figuring out, okay, like, what are the tools, what are the channels that we need to do? Can we control CAC? What is our budget? And all these things. So growth marketers are often in demand. Sometimes people, I worry, hire them too early and you just blow through your budget real fast. And so you really have to, probably once you're at your A where you've proved you have some signal for product-market fit and now you're ready to scale. So that growth marketer is really good. The brand marketers can come a bit later once you are really steady in your storytelling and you feel like, okay, like now we're ready to do You know, go a little bit bigger, and maybe that's Series B, Series C. But product marketers are often at the core. Maybe you need a couple of them to really get a lot of that right. And then comms often gets underlooked. Comms can come in at, I don't know, maybe at A, more often at B, and making sure that you're in control of your narrative and you're in control of your story, both internally and externally. And making sure that you're saying one thing 100 times versus saying 100 things one time, which often happens. And sometimes that happens naturally because you're a startup and you're evolving. And, you know, I see this in our own portfolio companies that they'll send a monthly update and remind us who they are. And I'm like, well, that wasn't the same as last month, but that's because we learned the following things. So that's okay. That's to be expected. But once you're at sort of like Series A, Series B, you want it to be a little bit more consistent.

Yeah, we've had a little bit of that challenge as well because we're doing a number of things. Let's talk about comms for a bit because it feels like that playbook has slightly evolved or it feels like just the world has changed. And I'm curious how you think about a comms playbook in 2022 that might have been different in terms of what you'd tell your portfolio companies in 2022 as opposed to what you wouldn't tell them or would be different from what you would tell them in 2015 or something. How do you think the world has changed and how should comms leaders I don't think that much has changed comms-wise.

I think I would still say the same things. Be authentic, be clear, be honest, own it. When you do things right, tell the whole world. When you screw up, own it, explain why, and get through that really, really fast. Last night, I know this will be somewhat dated, but in the Oscars, Will Smith goes up and slaps Chris Rock. It's terrible, right? But he had a chance to fix it. He went up and got Best Picture, or no, who did he get? Best Actor, right? So great. He gets up there and gets Best Actor and thanks the Academy and apologizes, but he doesn't apologize to Chris Rock. Like, what a blown stupid opportunity, right? Like, that makes me even more mad. So things like, you know, if you are going to make a mistake and, you know, and make sure it's not a big mistake, but whatever kind of mistake it is, like, just be honest.

Yeah.

Remorseful, and move on quickly. So I think those are the very similar things that are tried and true and really not really time constrained. I think you still need to be those things.

As a company is doing really well, like take a Clubhouse or something or a Lambda School or I don't know, any sort of company du jour of its moment, there's all these people who want to build you up. There's all these people who want to create hype around your company because it's taking off. And I always question whether they should pursue that because it feels like any company that gets hyped just— I don't want to say has a target on its back, but is just in the limelight more in a way that could, you know, in the same way that people like to build companies up, they like to build them down. But at the same time, you don't want to be like, the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. So you don't want to be unknown.

Totally.

Do you have a perspective on how much one should seek out hype if the opportunity is there?

Dick Haslow had a great expression, it's never as great as you think, and it's never as bad as you think. Right? And so, so much of our jobs are helping our founders in the middle, lifting them up when they're down, and also like, all right, well, listen, yeah, congratulations on this round, but you have a lot of work to do. Like, here's what's ahead.

Totally.

So, you know, really making sure that we're always honest and authentic. And Aaron Zammos from Square has this great article about how there's sort of this clock of a narrative and how the tech press will often push it of like, hey, here's this new startup. It's doing great. Oh my God, is this the next Google? This is awesome. Well, it looks like things aren't so great. Never mind, it's really terrible. It's like the Muppet Movie, right? It's like you have the judges on there like, this is great. This is wonderful. It's not so bad. Well, it's really terrible. Boo. And so, you know, You have to be ready for that sort of clack and just stay eyes on the prize, keep looking forward, keep bringing your team forward, eyes on the mission, and don't worry about the small stuff.

Yeah, no, totally. That's well put. That's a good mental model. So we've talked about the marketing hub, we've talked about PMM, we've talked about growth marketers, we've talked about comms, we talked about brand. When should a company look for a VP of marketing?

I mean, it could be that you have a friend or somebody that you work with that you have great chemistry with, you trust them, You've seen her or his background and you like it. And it's a little early, but as we know, talent is really hard. It's so competitive out there. So, if you find somebody that you really like and it's a little early, grab her or him, right? Alternatively, be patient. Be slow to hire and fast to fire. And so, the VPs of marketing can come a little bit later. I do get worried when I see seed pitch decks and they already have their CMO or VP of marketing. I'm like, okay, tell me more about that.

Yeah.

What's your budget? And sometimes it makes sense, not often, but sometimes. So the VPs can come a little bit later.

Totally. How do you think about promoting from within versus bringing external expertise and experience in? What's your framework around that?

I am such a big believer of promoting from within. I mean, I think giving people as long of a runway as you can to continue to grow. I think it's great for the people that you've already invested in. I think it's great for the culture, for people to see that one of their colleagues has been promoted for their excellent work and service. I have a strong bias towards it. If you don't have that role or you don't have that person and you really need to hire above, that's fine. But when you start to do that, I think it's really important to make sure that you tell the team. For example, if you have that PMM in place, And they're wonderful and they're working hard, but you're pretty sure they're going to have a hard time scaling to that VP of marketing role or whatever, and you have somebody in mind, always tell that person first and say, listen, here's why we're going to hire externally. Here's why this is going to be great for you. And here's how your role may or may not change. And I want you to be part of the process. I want you to help us interview this person. And I think that's one of the best ways that you can And kind of move forward in a tricky situation.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then in terms of the, let's say you don't have a super close friend who's been a VP of marketing or a CMO. Well, let's say you've made the selection and you're onboarding them. What is the best way to make sure that your CMO or VP of marketing can work well with the rest of the org? Or how do you set them up for success?

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think like every role really, I don't know if it's specific to marketing, but It's, you know, okay, here are our expectations for the 30, 60, 90 days. Also, what are your expectations for the 30, 60, 90 days? And making sure you're super clear about that, being really clear about team and budget. And, and again, going down to listening, I think it's one of the things that's quite underrated in terms of like interviewing your customers. And I think all marketers should be spending, especially early stage companies, should be spending roughly 20% of their time interviewing customers or prospective customers, and really understanding what do they love or hate about substitute products, and understanding their language, and kind of feeding that back to the team, and maybe bringing in your product managers and your engineers, and making sure that they have similar types of empathy. So, there's a lot of learning and sharing, and like anything, you just have to build a lot of trust, especially among your senior organization that's kind of setting the pace, and the tone, and the goals for the company, and making sure everyone's steering in the right direction. Yeah.

What do you think separates the good CMOs or good VPs of marketing from the great ones?

Hmm. I sound like a broken record, but I really think it's really understanding and being deeply empathetic with the customer and not losing sight of that. And especially as your teams grow, it's easy to be in the executive boardroom of things and talk about all kinds of existential problems, but making sure you never get too far away from the heartbeat of the customer. as you grow and become a great CMO. I think Leslie Berlin, the CMO of Twitter, is doing a phenomenal job. Twitter is a hard product in a way to market because if you ask 100 Twitter users what Twitter is, I think you'll get 100 different answers. I think it's actually ironically Twitter has owned that and not tried to define it necessarily. I think Leslie has done a really Nice job on the marketing side there too. And I look at other big brands like Patagonia, like dreamy brand, right? So purposeful, so authentic, and willing to take hard— make hard decisions and take these risks. And I think the CMOs who are willing to take those hard risks and, and still be true to the customer are some of the great ones.

That's interesting regarding Twitter's positioning, because, you know, Undec is nowhere near obviously Twitter scope, but we Different people will describe us differently depending on how they engage with us because we have different programs for different people. I'm curious if you think that for Twitter that makes sense in ways that that could make sense for other companies as well. Twitter has an encompassing mission or where the world happens or however Twitter describes themselves, but practically they let people define it in different ways. Do you think other companies Should follow their suit if they have expansive products that can't be summarized? Or do you think that Twitter is the exception that proves the rule and most companies should say one thing 100 times?

Twitter might be on the exception side. I'm trying to think of others that are like them and I'm drawing a blank. So I think Twitter is quite unique. And so that's what makes an exceptional CMO because you're not going through this CMO playbook that no one ever hands you of here are the things that you should do. It's really, They're such a frontier type of company in terms of how to do things that really takes someone really thoughtful, a team that's thoughtful and honest and risk-taking.

Totally. I liked your framing, awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. On Twitter's end, they're one of the most well-known products in the world, so it's not an awareness thing. I think for Twitter, it's probably a conversion thing or loyalty thing. I'm curious how that framework, take it at color, was it— did you focus more on the awareness side? Or how do you think about where— how companies should use that framework?

Yeah, I think there's, you know, for some companies, you're quite lucky that awareness of what you're doing is quite high, like Uber. Everyone knows Uber, right? Like, you don't have to really market and describe what Uber is. And Twitter is also lucky that way. And it takes a lot of time and energy for new products to kind of evolve and get out there. But hopefully you strike, you're able to cross the chasm and you strike some kind of wave and you're able to grow.

Right.

Once you're there and you feel pretty good about, you understand your customer, you're able to sort of re— you can find them over and you can pattern match really quickly. You can find more customers like them. Then you're ready to start converting them because you can't convert too early because then you're just spending a lot of time and cycles needlessly and you have sort of a You know, a hole in your bucket, and you don't want that. So those buckets are really, you know, precious. So, so it's an art more than it is a science. But you're also going to need a lot of math and data to understand you're doing the right thing.

Totally. This is a lot of great color on building a marketing hub. I want to segue into a couple other experiences you've had, particularly working in the White House or working in government. Why don't you say a little bit about your journey there?

I'm curious kind of what tech doesn't really understand about I was really lucky in 2008 to be invited to join the Obama administration, and it was a front row seat to history. Moved my family out to Washington, D.C., and was trying to think of what are the ways that I can bring my Google learnings into the White House. I should also mention that I think it's really important for everybody to do public service. The problem is that it's really hard. We make it really hard for anybody to do public service. We think of public service like joining the military, which is super admirable, but it's not for everybody. So we have to make it easier for people to do it in either shorter increments or at different times in their lives and different forks in the road. Anyway, so public service I think is really important. So I was really lucky to have this opportunity and one of the first things I wanted to do was bring in OKRs. Erik and Larry and Sergey had beat this into our heads that we had to have OKRs. When I brought that into the White House, everyone was like, what are you talking about? That's so weird. I thought it would be so cool. What if President Obama could do these quarterly reports for citizens and, here are the top 5 things we're working on and here's our progress, but it wasn't the right place or the right time. But there were teams that liked it. Bringing in that kind of framework, I thought, was one mild contribution. The second was, at a high level, was trying to figure out, like, what are— how do we use the tools of the 21st century to address the biggest challenges of the 21st century? And if it's in climate, if it's in cybersecurity, if it's in healthcare, what are the things that we're missing? And that was super fun because I'd been— I had come from Silicon Valley, I had a great network, and I reached out to everybody like, the government needs your help. And what are the platform things that we can offer to allow the community to participate and make things better? So one of those things was helping to create data.gov, making all the US government's data universally accessible and useful. Like, what are ways that we can get better traffic, better weather data, whatever it may be? And so that was really hard to work on, but also really fun. I was also lucky enough to work with Samantha Power, who is now the head of USAID, and she is a modern-day Joan of Arc. I mean, she's amazing. And we worked on humanrights.gov. Bringing all the human rights data in the world and making that universally accessible and useful to people. And so things like that I thought were really important. We also— the big thing that we did that I was really proud of is that when there was an earthquake in Haiti, it was so devastating and so many people were suffering. And I had a friend who had a mobile donation platform and I didn't know him that well, but I knew he had set something up in the private sector and I reached out to him and said, Hey, is there any way that you can make it easier for Americans to make a donation to the Red Cross? And it basically charges your, your cell phone bill, but you text Haiti to 90999. And he's like, I'll have it up in 15 minutes. We had the thing set up. I sent it to Cheryl Mills, who was a chief of staff at the time working for Hillary Clinton. I was sure she'd be like, oh my gosh, no, like, here are all the procurement rules, blah, blah, blah. And she was like, let's do it. And so we launched this donation platform. Within hours, we had hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. Ev Williams at Twitter and Chris Sacca, of Chris Sacca fame, you know, also tweeted about it. And this thing went viral and we ended up raising $33 million in a week. And it was so fulfilling to be able to participate in something with such a big platform and podium for good. And then, of course, everyone the next week was like, all right, what else? What are we doing next week? We were like, we were really lucky there.

Yeah.

I don't know if we can— we can't have like, you know, a weekly text donation thing. But let's try to make sure, and it's just something, you know, you think of as a founder, like how do you, you know, meet the moment? How do you, you know, set up the conditions for your success to use your privilege and your access and the tools of the 21st century to make more lives better?

Totally. That's a great story to wrap on. I want to be mindful of your time. But before we do, I want you to talk about Moxie and just talk about what you're doing there. Because we have founders listening in, we're lucky to do a couple co-investments together, Sesh and I think one other super peer. And I think you're doing great work at Moxie. So why don't you just talk about what you're doing there and what your aspirations are for what you hope to build and serve founders?

Yeah, well, thank you. Thank you so much for the question. So I started Moxie 3 years ago. I'd been an active angel investor for the past 10 years and wanted to put more capital to work. And I also think venture is in the process of being disrupted itself. Hallelujah. They're finally, you know, a more diverse set of participants. Funding a more diverse set of founders, which is all great. And so my first fund was $25 million investing in early-stage companies that are making life and work better. We're now deployed out of our second fund, which is $75 million. I teamed up with a longtime friend and colleague, Alex Retter, who was the head of engineering at Twitter. And so we're working together as partners and we have an associate, Ina Halilu, who's amazing. And it's the same strategy. So trying to find founders that are building software solutions to hard problems that can help a lot of people. We're investing in multiple different categories. We love climate, we love health tech, fintech, economic mobility, and enterprise. And we love partnering with On Deck.

Yes, absolutely. Stoked to do more together. Well, Katie, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, giving a masterclass on all things marketing and just your background in general. is really inspiring. I appreciate you coming on.

Thank you for having me. We didn't even talk about Grandmaster Flash.

Yes.

Well, next time.

Maybe we'll do a little rap session there. We originally met doing a freestyle rap session, and you'd mentioned that one of the people that was very inspiring to you was Grandmaster Flash. So why don't you talk about one quick learning that you took from him?

Well, so I am on the older side, and it was one of my first records, and I loved hip-hop. And I think what I loved about Grandmaster Flash and what what they have taught us is the power of authenticity. And they, you know, talked about culture, they talked about social good, and they're really honest with the lives of so many people who are suffering. And they were also creative. And I think that blend of authenticity and creativity is always a good thing. So thank you, Grandmaster Flash. And it will always be my number one go-to song in karaoke, much to the chagrin of my friends because it's long and I can't sing.

Amazing. Amazing. That's a great place to wrap. Katie, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks for listening to today's episode. Execs is produced by On Deck, where top talent goes to start companies, find their next roles, or invest in their careers. If you're looking to start a company, uplevel your career, Or navigate a career transition, I encourage you to visit beyonddeck.com. See you next time. Bye.