The Exchanges

Q An interesting place to start would be telling the story about how you got involved with Stripe. And maybe what, if you can recall all the way back then, like, what did the first few months actually look like?

A So this was in late, and I had gotten an intro to the Stripe's founders from a colleague of mine. His now wife worked at Stripe, Christina Cordova. And my first conversation with the founders was, well, with John specifically, was telling them that they had done all of their websites wrong. And he asked me to critique a recent landing page they'd put up about Stripe Connect, the very first early version of that. Just the transfers API. And I went through it and I gave him some unvarnished feedback. I think he quite liked that. And I convinced them that they needed a marketer. They hadn't had a marketer until then and convinced them that they needed someone to think about marketing as a discipline full time. So I joined in, in late, 2013. The first couple of months, it was a crazy velocity place. Like we were launching things left and right. And I remember the very first launch that I worked on was the launch of multi-currency support. And even then, like before I started at Stripe, I already knew it was kind of special, right? In the conversations that I had with the founders, they had never done marketing before, but they already felt like they were 10 steps ahead of me. They had all of the right instincts. They were thinking about brand from day one. And I knew what I could do is kind of come in and help polish and amplify the work that they were doing, but I wasn't going to …

AI assessment note: “I had gotten an intro to the Stripe's founders from a colleague of mine.”

Q Maybe sort of building on the last point, how would you think about prioritization? You know, as that first, there could be an endless list of things that you could spend time on.

A Yeah. I mean, I was the first marketing hire at Stripe when it was 60 people. And so I saw it all the way through to around 7500 people. And in each chapter, there was a different set of priorities. But in those early days, Especially the first three years, I was the only marketer there. You know, every day was a constant exercise in prioritization. Do I work on a sales narrative that's going to be used for the next year by every single salesperson? Do I work on a blog post that needs to go out the next day? Do I work on, you know, ICP and, and buyer journey research so that we can get a little bit more crisp and articulated on who we're targeting and why? Competitive research and dynamics. So again, like the possibility space was endless in terms of what I could be doing. So When I advise startups now, what I suggest is that the job of the marketer, especially at the beginning, but actually on a constant basis, is that of diagnostician. You really need to kind of dial into what are the needs of the org today, right now. Maybe the horizon that you can take a look at is like the next three months, maybe the next six months, but at a hyper growth startup, probably just the next three months. And what you want to do as a diagnostician is to understand, again, what's the health of the funnel? You know, are we weak at the top of the funnel? And so do we need to do more demand gen th…

AI assessment note: “what I suggest is that the job of the marketer... is that of diagnostician”

Q of selling. I'm interested in maybe what else you figured out in marketing horizontal pieces of infrastructure or products relative to, you know, Stripe in the early days, you want to accept payments is very clear problem, very clear solution. It's entirely different when you have a horizontal Product. Is the answer always trying to verticalize? Are there other things that you've kind of figured out around marketing horizontal products?

A Look, like I've only had the pleasure of working at platform companies in my career at this point. And I think each of these kind of falls into slightly different axes that you might cut on. When I think about something like Stripe, even though you think of it as simple as accepting payments, there are so many differences in terms of the business model. So, you know, you have SaaS companies that need Description billing. You have e-commerce companies that are doing sort of one-time transactions. You have marketplaces like Uber or Airbnb that are not only accepting payments, but then paying out to the supply side of their marketplace. And so at Stripe, we actually started off with solutions that were based much more on your business model. And we would create these solutions for SaaS companies, for marketplaces, for e-commerce companies that would collate together a bunch of capabilities across our platform and API. At OpenAI, for example, Even though there are some horizontal use cases. So for example, you know, you might want to do something around semantics or, or you might want to do something around a better natural language processing or a better text to speech or translation type of use case. These feel fairly horizontal and, you know, a financial services company can just as easily avail of these three solutions that I just mentioned as someone in a manufacturing industr…

AI assessment note: “I think each of these kind of falls into slightly different axes that you might cut on.”

Q you kind of have one common site that you have all these different types of people coming to for different types of things. I mean, I'm sure you could spend hours talking about that project, but are there considerations or the way that you went about it that might be useful to other people that are, are taking on kind of a big meaty marketing kind of project like that?

A Ooh, yes. So many learnings. The first thing is, it was a departure from where we were previously because for the vast majority of its history, OpenAI was primarily a research organization, and all we were doing was communicating about research breakthroughs with The rest of the world. And now we operate products and services that a lot of companies, a lot of individuals rely on, on a daily basis in terms of running production workflows and use cases or relying on their jobs or for their daily lives. And so I think kind of moving a little bit of the balance, like we will always be a research organization. That is the DNA of the company. Admission of the company is in deploying safe AGI. And so it's never going to become just a product company. But I think bringing in some DNA of product and that influence of ChatGPT into the rest of the presence on the web was important to us. A lot of people know OpenAI for ChatGPT, and so the fact that it wasn't upfront and center, it wasn't easily findable was, I think, disingenuous. So that's why we now have ChatGPT kind of upfront and center on the website. The other part of that is the consistency piece that we talked about, Brett, which is, you know, you have one brand for ChatGPT, you have one brand for OpenAI, another brand for the API, like, It's all kind of one in the same. It's the underlying models and you kind of use them and util…

AI assessment note: “bringing in some DNA of product and that influence of ChatGPT into the rest”

Q You sort of hinted at this with sort of workshopping, but what, what advice would you give in terms of what does a good interview process look like for that first marketer?

A For the first marketer, you are going to be spending time with them in the same way that you would for any leadership hire. So If you're spending a day with your engineering manager, or you're having them spend time with the rest of the engineering team, if you're thinking about product roadmap together, you kind of want to do something similar for your marketer. The marketer is a very hub role that ends up having to interface with the product team, with the engineering team, with the design team, with the leadership team, with the rest of the organization, maybe even recruiting, right? Because you want to build a talent brand. And so you want them to get along well and be someone who can be A thought partner and someone who pushes the thinking of the rest of your leadership slate as well. So I would invest quite a bit in this one so that you understand how are they going to change the dynamic? How are they going to improve the dynamic? One question I always ask yourself is, did I learn something from that conversation? Did I learn something that is going to change my thinking about something that I'm already trying to move ahead in my company? And I think that's a mark of a great marketer.

AI assessment note: “spending time with them in the same way that you would for any leadership hire”

Q you did from a design perspective, like everything had to have been more expensive or a lot of it where you could have taken that money and done all sorts of other stuff, grown the sales team, done tons and tons of things. On a marginal dollar basis. So I'm curious, maybe early on and then as resources grew as like a capital allocator, how did you think about brand?

A That's such an astute question and it's probably going to be a meandering answer because there's so many different parts of it to unpack. The first and foremost thing is that brand isn't owned by marketing. Like I would be lying if I said that. And I also think it's disingenuous and probably like detrimental to how you think about brand at a company if you think marketing owns it. Brand is a shared cloud between marketing, between comms and PR, between the founders themselves, the product, like the brand is sort of the first touch point into the product. So I think if you think about it with that ethos, and for example, Stripe Press was an organization outside of marketing when it first started. We incubated it as a program that was really more mission driven. You know, Stripe's long term goals were around increasing the GDP of the internet and in order to do so, We were investing in the best world-class developer tools. We were also investing in sharing knowledge and sharing some of these ideas for progress with the world. And so I think if you do brand bets that are too orthogonal to your mission and they aren't tied in that way, I think people can very easily sniff that out. And so one of the reasons that Strike Press works and, you know, there are so many people who have been kind of copied that effort with an editorial arm of their own is because then it doesn't ladder up …

AI assessment note: “Brand is a shared cloud between marketing, between comms and PR, between the founders”