I've been lucky to build marketing foundations at @OpenAI@stripe@retool, and now love supporting amazing founders in @ThriveCapital's portfolio.
I joined @lennysan to talk about what *actually* works in marketing (and why adaptability is the most important thing to aim for)👇
Growth tactics from @OpenAI and @Stripe's first marketing hire @krithix
At @OpenAI, Krithika established marketing foundations for ChatGPT for consumers and enterprises, as well as their developer API platform. While at @Stripe, she spent over eight years building and scaling their marketing function from scratch. She also led marketing at @Retool, and marketing teams at
@Dropbox. An engineer turned marketer, Krithika brings a uniquely analytical approach to marketing. She currently serves as Entrepreneur in Residence at
@ThriveCapital, where she helps portfolio companies with all things marketing.
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Ranking engineers by token spend is like me ranking my marketing team by who spent the most money.
We may not have hit our KPIs, but Joe spent $200k on a branded blimp that only flies over his own house, so he’s getting promoted to VP!
Don't mistake a high burn rate for a high success rate.
Tempo Mainnet is live! Starting today, anyone can build on Tempo through our public RPC endpoints.
Alongside mainnet, we’re introducing the Machine Payments Protocol, an open standard for machine payments.
Thrive X is a real privilege: the chance to go deeper with the founders we already support today, and to partner early with the ones who will push the horizon forward in the years ahead. Onwards! 🚀
We are pleased to announce the close of Thrive X. Exceeding $10 billion, Thrive X comprises $1 billion designated for early-stage investments and $9 billion designated for growth-stage investments. We do not view this as a milestone, but as a commitment to the long work ahead.
We view Thrive as a company. Our product is partnership - the willingness to commit deeply to a small number of founders, and to stand with them through momentum and adversity. This is the discipline we bring to our work, and the responsibility we accept when founders partner with Thrive.
We do not hedge. Concentration demands loyalty to the founders and missions we back. In this moment, exposure alone is not a strategy. Judgment without commitment is not enough. Advantage will accrue to those who choose deliberately, commit deeply, and endure through difficult moments.
Thrive was founded to be an enabling technology for the world we want to see. We are deeply aware that we are not the main character. The founders that we are fortunate enough to partner with are the artists. Our role is to help create the conditions where great work can come to life.
We take a long view grounded in the belief that category-defining companies tend to create structural compounding advantages over long arcs. This fund reflects the continuity of our approach and the ways our work has deepened alongside the founders we support.
We are grateful for the trust our Limited Partners place in us, and for the opportunity to work alongside those who are building with purpose, integrity, and courage.
https://t.co/7ymRAxb6uL
If you’re overreliant on backchanneling exec candidates, you’re not doing diligence.
You’re outsourcing judgment.
I wrote more about how backchanneling is becoming a crutch: https://t.co/uWoiuCV2r4
Cursor’s growth from $1m to $1bn over the last two years is the pinnacle of excellence. There’s catching a wave and then there’s masterfully riding at Nazaré.
It’s relentless excellence and focus… At dinner with Michael in early 2024, when the team was just six people, he talked about their culture being “low hype, high pragmatism.” They’re focused on the product and they let the product do the talking.
They’ve built a truly exceptional team that exemplifies rare mastery of co-evolving product and model, from Tab in the IDE to Composer for agentic development. That has earned them $1bn worth of customer trust from the likes of NVIDIA and Shopify to Hilton.
The availability of intelligence is changing the world, and we believe Cursor is changing software development forever.
The average CEO cannot tell you the difference between an automation and an AI agent.
This breakdown (h/t @wadefoster) makes it glaringly obvious.
An automation is anything that requires no-trust decision making (if this, then that).
An AI agent is anything that requires some-trust decision making.
The most powerful workflows that I’m seeing businesses use today are neither pure automations nor pure agents.
They’re agentic workflows.
Agentic workflows get the leverage of AI (read: intelligent decision making) that deterministic software never offered. But they also have the predictability of automations, where the cost of error is too high.
Knowledge work will continue to get pushed further right on this spectrum as the technology improves, but today living in the middle is often the sweet spot.