Aditya Ramakrishnan

PMM @ Stripe | 2X VP Marketing | B2B SaaS and AI nerd

[Cristina Cordova @cjc]

sometimes you are simply good at marketing. and that is enough. you are enough. you do not need to be an engineer

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@saaquibx And when they get a meeting, act like they're doing everyone a favour - not punctual, not prepared, no energy. Or better yet - ghost! If you don't want the job, say so.

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@saaquibx Especially after the founder brings her or his patented spiel on hustle / we're a family / life changing equity blah blah.
It's 2026. Candidates have heard all the sh*t before. Be Jon Snow, not Geoffrey Baratheon.

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@garrytan Aka Clayton Christensen's disruption theory. Which has been around from 1995.

[Kieran Flanagan 🤘 @searchbrat]

I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking to founders and marketing leaders.

This is my take on the state of B2B marketing right now (what’s working / what’s not).

1. Brand / Product Positioning. AI is consuming all the oxygen online. It’s all people post about or consume. It’s harder for any brand to make noise. Everyone wants to elevate their brand campaigns and positioning (because all products are starting to sound the same). The person who can do this is in high demand. The problem is there’s a real gap between the top tier in this role and everyone else. Very hard to hire.

2. AI (LLM) Optimisation. Everyone is bought into getting more visibility in the LLMs. Most have been doing it for some time. A growing % are now asking, “What am I getting back for this?” Today, all you can measure is referral traffic (people who clicked on links). That’s averaging out at less than 4% of the traffic that you used to get from Google. Measurement is the big ask here. I suspect will be partly solved by OpenAI and Google adding more visibility for paid advertising within LLMs.

3. Paid Advertising. Is going through a renaissance. The best teams are moving to value-based bidding (telling the ad platforms what a good lead actually looks like, not just optimizing for volume). That means ingesting way more first-party data back into the platforms. They are using AI to scale creative testing, generating and iterating on ad variations at a speed that wasn't possible before. And measurement has become meticulous about attribution, incrementality, and proving what's driving revenue.

4. Social. The majority are bought into ‘creator-led’ social. That means founder-led content (turning your founder into a personality online) and some select employees. Most are struggling to get any traction for the brand, outside of product hype videos (if the company is AI-native, has a cool product).

5. Creators. I’m going to give myself a little shout-out here. At HubSpot, we built our creator program in 2022. It’s now a huge part of our marketing engine. We saw creators becoming a dominant force in B2B, like B2C. It’s why I invested early in Passionfroot. Well, everyone now wants to work with creators. The challenge is going to be rising CAC. More demand. Limited pool.

6. Marketing Leadership. Nearly all founders don’t want a traditional marketing leader. They want a marketing leader with deep knowledge in GTM (experience across different motions), deep knowledge of working with sales, product, and engineering, who is incredibly strong in AI, is a systems builder, and isn’t a traditional ‘brand awareness’ CMO. The profile they’re looking for is incredibly hard to find.

7. AI. You’ll need to be strong in AI to get hired. All have integrated AI into their hiring process. Many are mandating the use of AI as part of the interview process; e.g. you’ll have an exercise to complete and need to demonstrate how you used AI to

[Anika @AnikaSomaia]

many such cases

https://t.co/oM3WwLoUPf

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@yongfook It's because teams are shipping features at speed. Product ui, user experience and journeys can't keep up - because those things take craft and time. So just slam all the new things into dashboard hell, and say "shipped"

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@dhwaninanavati In less twitter / tech bro words - "what better use of your time do you have than hiring and getting hired?"

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@dhwaninanavati I've not bought in on AI "doing the work" in hiring generally, and this use case even less than others. Hiring is the highest leverage human to human interaction, and the last thing to be abstracted to AI.

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@vaibhavbetter No you discount stuff that makes people love your product or brand and come back again and again.

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@yongfook Depends on how you define "reinvent". Imo the ICP and problem being solved rarely change - there's time-compounding expertise that can't be thrown away.
How the problem is solved, how the software interprets the problem to be solved - that evolves mostly, reinvents rarely.

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@kmr_dilip GDP / capita is higher, so at population levels, more men have stepped out of physical jobs and are sedentary.

Also Rice.
Astounding quantities of rice.

Go to Coimbatore or Davangere and see how the avg. gent eats.

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

Migrating from LinkedIn. Realising the overwhelming majority of LinkedIn connections are not worth following when you choose who to follow with intent.

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@dhwaninanavati The only positive outcome that really matters is some version of looking yourself in the eye in the mirror and saying some version of "f*uck yeah, well done".

Yes, some version of honesty and integrity is needed for that.

[Emily Sands @emilygsands]

Coding tools changed what’s possible for engineers. We took that same model and asked what could give more Stripes—sales, finance, ops—that same boost. Here’s how we built Stripe’s Knowledge AI Platform. https://t.co/2POTmqjqyD

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@harris Snacks. And staying on top of the Kombucha trends.

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

Linkedin released a "this is AI slop" button.

I suspect this is the 2026 version of Facebook's poke circa 2004.

Users will get a kick out of pressing the button.

Under the hood, nothing changes.

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@SahilBloom Kidnapped. Treasure island. Robinson crusoe. Three musketeers. Tales from 1001 Arabian nights ( Lyons edition), bullfinch's mythology, Ben Hur, 20k leagues under the sea, Jungle Book.

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@AIFrontliner As long as it's saying slop like "it's not the models, it's the skills" I'll keep my file tyvm

[Aditya Ramakrishnan @AdityaIn280]

@jayair Nothing. Be idle. Free your mind.