'The Operators': Experts from WeWork and Brex talk marketing - Getting the most bang for your buck

Tim Hsia & Neil Devani Contributor

Tim Hsia is the CEO of Media Mobilize and a Venture Partner at Digital Garage. Neil Devani is an angel investor and venture capitalist focused on companies solving hard problems.

The show:

The Operators brings experts with experience at companies like AirBnB, Brex, Docsend, Facebook, Google, Lyft, Carta, Slack, Uber, WeWork, etc. to share insider tips on how to break into fields like marketing and product management. They also share best practices for entrepreneurs on how to hire and manage experts from domains outside their own.

In this episode:

In Episode 4, we’re talking about marketing. Neil interviews Christiana Rattazzi, Head of Technology Marketing at WeWork, and Elenitsa Staykova, VP of Marketing at Brex.

Neil Devani: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Operators, where we learn from the people building the companies of tomorrow. We publish every other Monday and you can find us online at www.operators.co. I’m your host, Neil Devani, and we’re coming to you today from Digital Garage here in downtown San Francisco.

Joining me is Eli Staykova, Vice President of Marketing at Brex. Brex is the corporate credit card for start-ups, one of the fastest companies to reach a billion dollar evaluation, having launched barely two years ago, and its customers include Y Combinator, Flexport, SoFi, and many, many other startups.

Also joining us is Christiana Rattazzi, the head of enterprise technology marketing at WeWork. WeWork, with almost 10 billion dollars in financing to date, also counts major corporations and startups among its hundreds of thousands of customers. The firm is reportedly the largest leaseholder in New York, London, and Washington DC and has a footprint in almost a hundred other countries.

Eli and Christiana, thank you for joining us. Just to start, if you can share with our listeners about yourselves, a little bit about where you’re from and how you got into marketing, that’d be great.

Christiana Rattazzi: Happy to lead off. I’m actually from the Bay Area, go Warriors and I was pre-med through college and really thought I was going to go to med school and as I started studying for the MCAT, really discovered that that was what the path was going to be like.

One where you spend a lot of time in the library and maybe you weren’t up for it later and I wasn’t sure I wanted to sign up for that but I wanted to be at a company and being able to speak about a product that I was passionate about. And so that got me into cleantech, as I started my career, actually in cleantech, in marketing because I really loved to write and I love to tell stories.

So that was the beginning of my career and it’s been a great ride since then.

Devani: And what about yourself?

Eli Staykova: I came to the Bay Area in 2006 so I’ve been living here for the past thirteen years, it’s been quite the ride. I came here for the business school at the GSB, Stanford, and I started my career in finance, so I worked for IFC, International Finance Corporation, then for UBS in their LBO group, and I thought that you know after that I would stay in finance.

However, after Stanford I decided to work and live here in San Francisco and it’s so hard to be in the Bay Area not working in tech so I eventually joined the tech world. I work for Apple in their corporate finance team and I recently made the switch back in February at the new company Brex.

Devani: Very cool. These are two very exciting companies, two companies that do a lot of marketing, probably have very sophisticated marketing operations at least that’s what I would assume from the outside.

For the folks who are listening, who maybe don’t know much about marketing, can you help us understand at a very high level, the marking operation in your company. What are the different departments or roles, the different things that are just the nuts and bolts of how it works?

Staykova: Sure, so at Brex the marketing team is really small, so the company is very young. It’s less than 2 years old and the marketing team right now is only 10 people and we covered pretty much the main functions.

So we have brand marketing, we recently hired someone for product marketing, we have data and growth, and we are starting now to build our operations on the mar-tech side. But yeah it’s a small team, 10 people, so lots of room to grow.

Devani: And what about at WeWork?

Rattazzi: A little bit different. We’re a couple hundred people and the functions are really broad. They range from also growth and demand generation, so how do we bring in not only the awareness for our products but the actual demand for them across the co-working spaces in our enterprise spaces as well.

We also have a brand team as we feel that the brand actually is a really important component of what allows companies to grow over time. We have a product marketing team as well and that actually spans not only our physical products, cause we’re in an interesting space where we’ve got the spaces part of our business but also technology that sits on top of our spaces.

And then we also have operations, where we’re really really driven in and focused on data hygiene and making sure that things are automated and run on time. We’re also really regionally driven so we have a number of regional teams that sit within each region.

I think that the sphere of our offerings at such that having the localization is so important because every culture, every company, every country is so different and so we have a broad set of regional teams that address those different needs. And then internally we also have paid media, so we’re running our own agency internally as well so we can make the decision to bring that talent inside, and certainly communications is a big function for us. We’ve got strategy teams and I’m sure there’s plenty more I can’t even name, but we have a broad set of skills and folks that are leading the way that we tell the WeWork story.

Devani: That’s cool. So from someone from the outside who’s thinking about marketing and looking about it as a career, could you share what’s the good, what’s the bad, what are the things that you love about marketing or about the field and what do you think are the things that you wish were different, but may never change, i.e. it’s just the nature of marketing. Compare and contrast.

Staykova: Right, right. So the marketing function I think is one of the hardest functions at a tech company. Because it’s very heterogeneous, right you’re not just you know selling product where you are caught calling people and outbounding can make your sales go to market tactics. But on the marketing side you have to be a great storyteller.

You have to build the foundation for the marketing infrastructure and you also have to be with a growth engine along that, so there are many different functions that have to work together in synergy, so that you can build momentum and presence on the market. That’s the difference between marketing and let’s say product management or sales.

And that makes it hard, but that’s what makes it so interesting because as a marketer you have to wear so many hats. And if you are a great storyteller, if you put the customer in the in the spotlight, and then you’re also able to measure and build growth machines around your product, great things can happen.

Devani: So if you enjoy story telling, it might be a good fit for you.

Staykova: That might be a good fit, yeah exactly.

Devani: But you have to be multi-talented.

Staykova: Yes, especially in these days, you have to be very quantitative oriented, but at the same you have to have that creative angle.

Devani: Yeah, is that how you would phrase it or is that the experience you had?

Rattazzi: Yeah, I echo a lot of that. I think depending on the size of the team, you can go as deep or as not deep.

If you are somebody who is quantitatively focused and you love numbers and you’re strong in systems thinking, I think there’s a role for you in marketing. I think if you’re a storyteller and you love writing or you’re a very visual person, there’s a position for you in marketing.

I do think it actually can serve a multitude of talents and interests, that said, I think a smaller company and having just coming from a startup, I think a smaller company needs more of the jack-of-all-trades earlier on because you need someone who’s maybe more balanced than their thinking cause you only have a ten-person team. Whereas at a company like WeWork, you can get the deep specialist, you can get somebody who is really deep in the systems and is focused on data governance and how do we decide to structure some of our data in the CRMs for example.

So I would say if somebody’s really thinking about marketing, evaluate first how deeply am I rooted in some of the things that I want, whether it’s being closer numbers or whether it is on the storytelling side, the left or right brain more classically, and then thinking about how deeply do I want to be rooted in those things, and if it’s really deep and I think larger companies are the place to go because you can really specialize. Whereas if you consider yourself loosely on one side more than the other, then I think a smaller company is actually a really interesting fit because you can probably flex multiple sides of that muscle.

Image via Getty Images / Anya Plonsak

Devani: That’s interesting segue, cause it leads into why someone might want to get in the market, because maybe they are good at storytelling and they want to practice a broad set of skills around being quantitative and being created as well, or maybe they want to work at a large company because they want to just do one thing.

But let’s assume they already know they want to, they understand it, or maybe they don’t understand it but they just assume they want to be a marketer. What’s the best way to do it?

Let’s say someone who is in college or someone who is in a different field, they want to get into marketing. What advice would you give for someone to break in, especially thinking about either a tech startup or a larger tech company?

Staykova: That depends on the type of company they want to join, not so much their age or if they’re right out of college or if they’ve already worked at other companies. I would say for anyone that’s looking for the next job, whether that’s in that function or in any other function like sales or finance or anything really, optimize for the company and not so much for the function or for the title.

Optimize for the company. If early on in your career you actually want to work for a high growth company where you would be surrounded by really smart people, you would learn a ton from them and that would accelerate your career.

That would apply for the marketing function and really for anything else. But if I were one of these people that are thinking about a career switch, or they’re just graduating college or business school, optimize for the company would be my advice. Then within that specific type of companies will be the high growth companies where you won’t have an opportunity to work on a variety of projects and you would experience what success looks like.

Devani: Got it, okay.

Rattazzi: Yeah, I would agree with that, I think optimizing I would say people and product. It’s so thinking about the product that’s being sold and whether you can really get yourself behind that because I think that’s going to make it easier to make for you to not only how do you sell your job but also yourself to that company if you are really passionate about what they do.

I think people make a huge difference especially if you are changing careers, thinking about the people with whom you’ll be working every day and leveraging connections whenever possible. For folks who are coming straight out of college, I would also think about it in that way but I would also say you don’t get too hung up on that first role. Just get in, get your hands dirty, and just go.

And I would agree with what Eli said is that high-growth companies are going to offer you the most opportunity to really touch different parts of the business and also to be able to pick your own path, which I think can be really fun and so you’ll maybe get into one role and I know that when I started my career, it was in solar. And at the time solar was growing and I started on the creative team and I was doing project management across different teams and then moved into the segment and industry marketing role.

I think it was the growth of that company and also having seen a bunch of different roles and interact with different folks, I was able to find my place and then excel in that place. So, I would say don’t get too hung up on the first spot and pick for product, for people, and I think for trajectory too. That’s a really good callout, cause that’ll allow you to have the flexibility you want, then actually have the privilege of choice.

Devani: Yeah, yeah, so everyone should try to be like a VC themselves in terms of picking a company they think is going to be successful, like make a bet.

Staykova: Exactly, that’s very important. Spend a ton of time talking to people, even to VCs, because they know which are the successful companies.

Devani: As someone who invests in startups, I would say people pretend they know, but they don’t always know. Humility is rare in the industry.

Let’s say someone has gotten a job, they found a great company like Brex or WeWork, they got an entry-level job in marketing, they’re very excited and now they’re going to figure out what can they do to be successful, what are the skills they should be trying to pick up or brush up on, nights and weekends who are the people they should be networking with. What advice would you give for folks who really want to excel, if they want to put in the extra effort?

Staykova: Let’s say someone joins our team, we’re still a relatively small team. One, they will be able to work on a variety of projects, but to really excel with Brex and our culture there, one is you would want to work hard.

That’s just the nature of the job. It’s still a startup, we are almost 200 people, and there is still more work to be done than there are people. You should know this is not a nine to five job, right, so that’s one, you would want to work hard.

The second one is not taking things for granted and just do them because someone says so or because you have read it in someone’s article on the internet, but things from first principles. We spend a ton of time talking to people about that and questioning and really trying to understand why, why, why you want to do that versus something else.

So having the ability to think from first principles is very important in a startup where things are constantly moving and changing. Another important factor would be to network outside of your team, whether that’s with other leaders at Brex or at the company that you’re at, and with people outside of the company that you work for, whether that’s a mentor or someone you aspire to. And take a few minutes of time and talk to them to get the external perspective, otherwise it’s really easy to work 24/7 and stay really focused and isolated in your own bubble.

Devani: So get outside your bubble, meet the rest of the people out there.

Image via Getty Images / aelitta

Rattazzi: I would even say and also get out of your bubble and meet the people that are tangentially related to your team, and you touched on this and I completely agree. I think something that’s undervalued, especially when you are early in your career and maybe it’s your first job out of college is network with the people across the teams.

So in marketing that means, get to know the sales guys, sit with them, listen to the things that annoy them or the materials they wished that they had and don’t. Sit with folks in product and understand how they think about the future and how they might plan for future sprints and addressing customer needs.

Early in your career, I was shy to start, and so try to not be shy. And I know that’s hard to do if you’re just getting out of the gate, but don’t undervalue the time spent with tangential teams because I think that that’s where a lot of knowledge is gained and that knowledge is what’ll help you find those opportunities that your boss won’t be able to find. So you’ll hear the specific pain points and you’ll hear it enough times to say “I think this is important”.

And so I think building those relationships and building into your mind, “What are the trends that I’m noticing?” and bringing those trends, and having the guts to go to your manager, or to your team, and say, “Hey, I think these things are worth solving”. I think those are the difference makers.

That and you spoke about working hard and I couldn’t agree more, I think it’s that coupled with just cross the finish line. If you’re going to do something or you’ve been asked to do something by a certain date, just do it and I think that have a certain level of accountability and reliability and meeting deadlines, I know it sounds simple, but I think that if I’m trying to hire that person, I want someone who says they’re going to something and then does it because those are the type of people that I know can grow with very little direction and that have the autonomy to really be successful.

Staykova: Our type of companies, I would also say that, because you don’t have the structure and the benefits of large teams like Apple, where you have unlimited help from other teams, I would say at smaller companies you can have excuses or you can have outcomes, but you cannot have both.

You cannot have outcomes and excuses. So it’s important to have that mentality and to be able to get the job done no matter what, otherwise it’s really to fall into the trap of excuses.

Devani: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting point you both touched on right on terms of if you’re going to work at a startup, this is probably true of any company, but you’re gonna work at a startup and you have to take the initiative, you have to take ownership as opposed to doing the narrow scope of what you’ve been asked to do and wait for the next thing that you’re asked to do.

Rattazzi: And I think marketing is unique compared to a couple of the other functions in the sense that there’s usually a big budget behind marketing. I know for sure at a startup, and even at a company like WeWork that’s a little bit larger, everyday dollars are being spent and you’re sitting in a fairly large cost center, and so time equals money.

And so I think that time matters, and that’s why taking initiative matters because being able to deliver things more efficiently than you were expected to because of either spend or time goes a really long way. And I think that also makes marketing challenging because you are a cost center and proving the value of what you do and how you do it matters a lot, but I also think it’s a really big luxury because it means that you’ve got a strong backing and the flexibility and creative to really actually make a difference and tell a story in a really bold way.

Devani: Yeah, that’s a lot of different things to have to think about. So when we think about marketing, I think most people understand the general idea of you’re doing some creative whether it’s like a video or a still image or even just text, and then you’re figuring out where to put it and then you’re publishing it out there, just general advertising.

Can you guys talk a little bit about how you think about what creative you should create, where it should go, and what you’re trying to get on that and maybe touch things around like the difference between brand awareness and reach versus more clear attribution and click through and things like that, how do you think about those different pieces?

Staykova: Yeah that’s a good question, I would say it depends. It depends on the marketing strategy. For Brex, I’m still relatively new at the company, but the strategies that I’m implementing at the moment have to a few things. So we are splitting the budget into top of funnel brand campaign that you cannot directly tie to attribution.

Then the second big bucket of our spend is around the tactics that you can then point the finger and say “I did this type of tactics which contributed x amount of sign-ups or activations, you can tie them directly to acquisition, and then a really small part of our body is being spent on tests and things that will prepare us for the future. So then, if that’s the strategy, what we’re creating would depend, so for our brand campaigns you know we have both creative.

You might have noticed our billboards here in the city, but that type of messaging is very specific for the audience that we’re trying to reach, which is the startups and guess what, there’s so many in San Francisco alone. And then the rest of the big spend for assets it’s around acquisition and that big channel and the goal here is to create synergies among the various channels between digital paid campaigns, email, events that we sponsor and we go to, and each of these channels will have different creative and assets, but it all has to tie together to the story we’re trying to say.

And finally, for the testing phase, that’s just you know, these are new tactics and channels and campaigns we’re testing, really small percentage of the total spending and budget, to prepare for the future. So ideally, you want to tie your assets and your messaging and the story to the audience that you are targeting.

Image via Getty Images / nadia_bormotova

Rattazzi: Yeah, I think it’s both who are you talking to, and like what do they already know or don’t know about you? And so I completely agree, I think for us as we think about the entrepreneur and marketing to the entrepreneur versus marketing to the head of real estate at a Fortune 100.

We think about those two groups and what they care about very differently, and then she spoke about the funnel I think if you are trying to get into marketing, become really, really familiar with the marketing funnel. That’s just generally, what do they know, what’s their path to you, and hopefully buying from you?

And so at the top it’s for those two parties, whether Fortune 100 or entrepreneur, do they know who you are and what you provide, and if not how do you get that out there? I know Brex does the billboards on Highway 101, WeWork is exploring similar things and has done a bunch of those across the globe, so that’s like step 1.

Do they know who you are and then do they know what you do? And then how do you tailor their path towards you and closer to you over time? And a lot of that is digital, and I certainly think it’s digital on the smaller end for us, on the small to medium-size enterprise end or the one to two desk co-working space, but then I think another path here is also through sales interactions.

So as we target large enterprises we have to think about what’s their experience, and speaking with folks on our team and does it reflect exactly, you said, the consistent message that we might be giving to the market more broadly, whether it’s on a billboard, on a display ad, or even in a press piece, and so thinking about those across the board and making sure that by the time they speak to somebody they’ve gotten one message and when they speak to that person that message continues to be the same and just a little more granular over time.

Devani: That’s an interesting progression to have to think about and figure out. So a fun question for you both, between the common digital, you know you’re on Facebook, Google, and whatever smaller platforms, and then like out of home, your billboards and bus stops and what have you. Are there any areas you guys have done, like some test marketing or even full out campaigns that are unexpected that people don’t really think about when they think about marketing?

Staykova: So at Brex we run a campaign in Manhattan that played on a piece of trending news back then, that was in February, early March. It had to do with the Fyre campaign if you’re familiar with the Festival? Fyre?

Devani: No, what was the fire campaign?

Rattazzi: The Fyre Festival.

Devani: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Staykova: Fyre Festival. So it was a play on that, it was a catchy campaign with catchy name, humorous that built up on that trending news story and the tagline was “Fyre your corporate card”, fire with a ‘y’.

Devani: Okay.

Staykova: #FyreCorporateCard. And with that, and it was a controversial campaign because some people associated Brex with the Fyre Festival and with the cards that they were using. Of course many other people got the joke and it was a campaign that people talked about on social media and Instagram.

We had a contest, it ran for over a month and it was a test for us to get exposure in a new city outside of the Bay, and to capitalize on a trending news story. Would I do it again? I don’t know, but it is a different campaign.

Devani: It was different, yeah. Very cool. Have you guys done anything like that, anything cheeky or any like interesting channels that are non-traditional?

Rattazzi: Yeah I think there’s a couple that come to mind actually and even before my time at WeWork. One is, I know I worked for a company, and one of our competitors was holding their annual user conference, and I think we had set people to be like right outside that user conference and do a little bit of a guerilla marketing thing, and to just try to raise awareness because that was going to be exactly the type of people we wanted to be talking to, with the right interests and the right mindset.

And so a little bit of a rougher tactic that actually at the time was pretty fruitful because we raised a lot of awareness in a short amount of time and it was in San Francisco. And so it was a creative thought, like how do we reach the right people, really quickly.

And then I know WeWork is thinking about where do our buyers go and I heard one thing that I think we’re going to test again, and I believe we have in the past before my time, something as simple as like airplane magazines, right. So I once heard the, I think it was the CEO of Untuckit, and for a while that was the only channel they used, airplane magazines, so I think thinking about where your buyer goes and no matter how you know, who reads Hemispheres after all, and actually people do.

Devani: You forgot your book, you forgot your tablet, it’s the only thing there.

Rattazzi: Exactly, and so I think thinking about where does your customer go and that doesn’t matter how unglamorous it might seem in the moment, give it a shot. So that’s something I know we’re thinking about too.

Devani: Very cool, very cool. Well if I see a WeWork ad in the Hemispheres magazine I’ll let you know.

Rattazzi: Yeah please tweet it.

Devani: So let’s shift gears a little bit. Let’s do a little bit of roleplay. I’m a founder, I just started a company, I don’t know much about marketing, I’ve never done marketing, never been a marketer, and I have a product that I’m selling, and it’s just myself, my co-founder, and we’re thinking about “Should we hire a marketer? How should we think about it? The right time to make our first marketing hire, what’s the thing to decide on?”

Staykova: Interesting question, I would recommend if I’m the founder, you should think about hiring a marketer after you have a product-market fit. Before that it’s probably pointless. So as a founder, your goal should be to one, find a pain point in the market, build a product for that, and then once you have a validated you have a product-market fit, and people are going to purchase or adopt your product, then it’s probably the right time to think about your distribution strategy.

And then, from the distribution strategy, that would depend on the product, whether it’s a B2B product, or a consumer product. If it’s a B2B product, you may want to think about bringing salespeople on board, to help you scale and gain some traction and then immediately right after start thinking about your marketing strategy.

On the consumer side, there’s no sales, and marketing generates the sales for the company, so as soon as you have product-market fit, you would want to bring a marketer to build that distribution strategy for you. So that’s how I would think about it.

Image via Getty Images / erhui1979

Devani: That makes sense, yeah.

Rattazzi: Yeah I would ask a similar question, like tell me about the product, where is it, who’s used it, and what’s been the feedback so far. I think finding product-market fit or at least getting your first few set of customers feel like a decent milestone to be like, “okay, there’s tractions here, what do we do from here?”

So, I think about B2B products first, are there folks using it is, is it going well and do we think that with a little bit of a lighter fluid this thing can actually grow up a little bit more? And the same goes I think on the consumer side, like, what sort of traction have you received?

Maybe it’s funding and an early stage website, or sign up flow, but I think the moment the founder should be thinking about is like, “okay, there’s something here that feels like it’s fairly predictable within a sphere of what’s rational, but something that’s predictable that given a little bit of fuel and some adjustments, it can grow. That said, I do think that there’s interesting value in pre-product market fit companies, so if you’re like, “I think we have product-market fit, but I’m not sure,” I’m increasingly seeing and hearing of opportunities where you want a marketer to help you create demand by creating the category that goes with it.

So maybe you know as a founder so deeply that you’re solving something that is a big need, maybe because you suffered from that need beforehand, but you’re like “hey it’s not just a better mousetrap it’s a completely new thing.” And so, we need someone to help us create awareness for that.

I think that in some ways, the Lyft and Ubers of the world did that because it was just like, it was a better taxi, but it was also a completely different market, especially as we think about the new use cases around that enterprise, Uber for enterprise, etc. There’s value in hiring a marketer to think about, “how do we actually create the market to then create demand for this thing that I think is really valuable.”

It’s certainly riskier and so it takes a certain flavor of crazy to be that marketer that does that. That said, I think it’s actually a really interesting opportunity and that’s the reason why a bunch of us live in Silicon Valley, is for those opportunities where you’re like, “this feels different and yet feels important too.”

Devani: Yeah it has potential, it has legs, is what I like to say. If you decide you’re going to hire someone, obviously in the most idealized world, you would hire someone who has tons of experience, who’s not so senior or not the person who would be worried about getting their hands dirty and doing low-level work despite being so experienced, and you’d also want to hire them for a very low price.

Obviously, that’s not how it works. So, when you’re thinking about your first hire and you’re ready to make it, you have product-market fit, how junior do you think you can go for your first hire? Can you hire someone who has no experience, you see if they can learn on the job? Or would you say like two years experience? What’s a good barometer?

Staykova: As a founder, I would probably want to hire a few people, not just one person and I probably wouldn’t start with the with a very senior role like a VP of Marketing or CMO. But early on I would want to hire someone that’s focused on content creation, someone that’s good at distribution strategy and growth, and then someone that’s on the brand and design side that can produce the assets for your product.

And then these people, it depends on their skill set, but in terms of functions, I would probably go for these types of functions, and then they would need to have some level of experience, because you’re not working at a big company like Google, Facebook or Apple, where you’re highly specialized and you focus on just one very small piece of execution.

You would have to wear many hats even if these are your specific roles, you would probably have to work on copy, and support a product launch, or go to a conference. So, the people have to be skilled, they have to know how to multitask and be skilled at many different functions, but obviously specializing in each of these three areas with certain level of experience, at least few years.

Rattazzi: I would say early on, maybe the branding design can easily be outsourced depends maybe on the value you place on brand, but certainly it’s going to be a need no matter what and so you’re right on that. For me I would be like, “I don’t know if you need to hire that person” right out the gate.

That said I would agree, I think maybe hiring someone straight out of college if it’s her first marketing hire might be a bit of a gamble. That said for any founder that I think is trying to hire their first marketer, think about attitude before aptitude. Certainly aptitude matters a lot and you want someone who has a broad set of skills and I think I find that usually there’s like a fork in the road for that first marketing hire.

It’s either your growth and demand gen if you’re a B2C business or a B2B business that focuses on SMB, or you might go the product marketing route. So somebody who can help enable sales, create a narrative, and help set the stage for that product, but certainly I think thinking about the attitude of that person, and I know that even as a marketing leader when I had to make my first hire, I thought about someone who could hang cause I think that being in startups and even a large company like WeWork, things can change a lot and so you want somebody who’s got a certain level of grit and a lot of things can be taught, but I think attitude and grit can’t.

And so I would ask a founder to really think about also the softer attributes that they want knowing that some of those other skills that you talked about, whether it’s on the growth side, or on the storytelling, or on the product marketing side, those can be found but some of the other things actually can’t be taught. So don’t underestimate the importance of that, especially at an early company because hiring someone takes a lot of time and dollars and firing does too.

Devani: Yeah, that’s very true, like with all ads. Great advice, thank you. So before we wrap up, I would love to hear from both of you if you have any favorite media that relates to marketing, a book you’ve read, a TV show, a movie, anything that just give us a little bit of an insight or actually covers in-depth the field, that you’ve read or consumed lately.

Staykova: I would say that for marketing and distribution strategy, but also for a more holistic take and understanding of what’s going on in the tech world, I really like the Stratechery blog.

Rattazzi: It’s a good blog.

Staykova: Yes. And also, the podcast the Exponent which is ran by Ben Thompson who authors the Stratechery as well as James Allworth. It’s a great podcast that marries strategy and technology and they touch on many points, distribution one of them, as well as strategy and how the forces in tech work together or you know clash, and then what do you make out of that.

Devani: I am a big fan of both, so I enjoy those.

Rattazzi: Yeah, I think I also tend to gravitate towards autobiographies or stories from the field and so I know that when I read Ben Horowitz, ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things’, that for me was a really impactful book. And it’s not only because he cites rap lyrics at the beginning of every chapter, which I think is brilliant and also humanizes him in a really deep way.

But I think if you want to nerd out on the marketing discipline, it’s an old school book, and I think she was a GSB professor, Barbara Minto, wrote this book and I’m forgetting the name but it really talks about information architecture and how to give presentations and structure the way that you communicate, either in a written document or on PowerPoints, and I know for all your markers out there this sounds really boring, but trust that you can go through the book and actually I think I understand how to make your ideas stick in such a way that allows them to be successful because I think as a marketer, self-marketing and internal marketing is an extremely important art.

And so, I found that the Barbara Minto book was recommended to me by one of our investors, Michael Dearing at Harrison Metal, was really, really excellent that helped me think about, “okay, I have this idea I really believe in it. How do I communicate it? How do market myself and my ideas in such a way that it can be successful and I can actually execute on it?” Barbara Minto’s, I think it’s something has the title pyramid in it, it’s excellent.

Devani: I’ve never heard of it, I’ll have to check it out.

Rattazzi: Yeah you should. I believe she was a professor, maybe at Stanford.

Devani: Awesome well that brings us to our end today. Christiana, Eli, thank you for joining us at, and to our audience this has been another episode of The Operators talking about marketing. Thank you!