🎖 Why you need a benevolent dictator, Friedberg bets that Coke and McDonalds will die, ...

I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you don’t have to.

This is the 26th edition of Best 3 Podcasts of the Week 🥉🥈🥇, featuring Marketing Against the Grain, My First Million, and All-In.

What you need to know

• 🏋️‍♀️ How to think about marketing by company size

• 🎖 Why you need a benevolent dictator

• 💀 Friedberg bets that Coke and McDonalds will die

Bonus theme

• 🧑‍🎤 Word of the day: Showmanship

🏋️‍♀️ How to think about marketing by company size

🥉 Third place (4 min read vs 43 mins listening)

Boy, do I have a treat in store for you. Here’s marketing advice from Sumaiya Balbale, the CMO of Sequoia Capital (the 3rd biggest VC in the world by assets under management). She breaks down what makes a great leader and how you should think about marketing based on the stage of your business.

What they say

Seed stage priorities

If you’re really early, like pre-seed, you may not need a marketer, especially given the talent composition that might exist between you and your co-founder.

I always start with that. What are the capabilities of the founders themselves. Some have deep customer empathy. Some have a great design sense.

At the seed stage, you don’t have anything close to product market fit.

The conversations I have with early stage founders have to do with how deeply they understand the pain points of their customers.

When you’re early and mid stage, you’re scrappy. You make as much impact with as little as possible. That’s the DNA you want to continue in your organization in perpetuity.

Sumaiya Balbale

Series A and B priorities

One of the common mistakes is bringing in someone who is strategic but can’t roll up their sleeves and get things done.

Be very, very clear what your marketing and business goals are for the next 12 months. You’re hiring for that period of time.

Hopefully, that individual will scale and become someone that can continue to build the organization, but it’s okay if they can’t.

I see the mindset of ‘We tried that but it didn’t work.’ You forget that your business is evolving rapidly so your value proposition is changing. Things that may not have worked 3 months before may still work again.

Related to that is being clear what you’re testing. A channel may not have worked because the messaging was off. People are too quick to toss things out because they’ve ‘done it’ before.

Sumaiya Balbale

Series C, D, E priorities

What makes a great CMO at this stage:

1. Do good people want to follow them? 

2. Do they understand the business? They can’t be so functionally focused in their thinking. They need to be a holistic business partner to you.

3. Can they take risks? They need a capacity and appetite for risk that can push you to do the things that are unproven so you can unlock a larger size of the market.

In order to crack that next level of scale, you need to be willing to make the big ask.

The average tenure of a CMO is very short because if you make the wrong bet, you burn a lot of money and you’re out. You need to put more chips on the table to find the next opportunity.

A CMO needs to say ‘If you want me to climb the next mountain, this is what I’m going to need, versus this is what you’ve given me.’ That’s the leadership shift that happens.

Sumaiya Balbale

What I say

Why it matters: Although Sumaiya wears a VC lens, her advice is still applicable for bootstrapped founders. The only difference is the weight you’d give toward being scrappy and understanding the wider business. Bootstrapped companies have less cash in the bank, so you have less shots on goal. Marketing leaders need to be more clinical with scoring profitable channels, more in tune to what’s going on with the rest of the business, and more ruthless with their priorities.

Between the lines: Experience is less important until you’re looking to scale. Aptitude and attitude matter so much more. I have 3 key traits that I look for when hiring leaders in early to mid stage companies. These rules apply to all functions, not just marketing:

1. Bias to action. They make quick decisions based on the information they have to hand. If new information contradicts their plans, they have the strength of character to change them.

2. Take accountability. They lead projects with conviction and focus on the things that move the needle. When (not if) things go wrong, they look into why this happened and share their learnings.

3. Exceptional communicators. They give everyone they work with the context needed to do their job and empower colleagues to take on responsibility and move quickly.

🎖 Why you need a benevolent dictator

🥈 Second place (4 min read vs 1 hour 3 mins listening)

Every project needs a leader. Without one, decisions get delayed. This invariably leads to ambiguity, infighting, and compromise to the point that nobody’s happy. Sam Pare and Shaan Puri discussed the importance of a benevolent dictator and the types of leaders that thrive during uncertainty.

What they say

Sam posits that unstable leaders make the best wartime CEOs

I’m reading this great book about leaders. The theory is that during okay times, a mentally stable leader could be adequate.

During bad times, mentally unstable leaders are typically the best because they understand the ups and downs.

Unstable leaders are crazy enough, kind of like when an entrepreneur invents something, versus the type of person who runs it on an even keel.

You need extremes during extreme times.

Sam Parr

Shaan advocates the importance of a dictatorship

The norm in startups is the benevolent dictator. We agree for better or for worse, this person is the captain.

We’re going on their ship and we’re either going down or we’re going to the promised land.

That’s how the best startups work. They pick a captain and they just ride or die with that person.

We need to make decisions fast. One person is always faster than a committee.

We need to be extremely decisive. We can’t be constantly torn by one group wanting A and another wanting B.

In companies, you actually need a dictatorship. People aren’t often comfortable with that because it’s not what you want with your country.

You want a dictatorship on any creative project. You want a crazy genius who’s going to be driving the thing. Everyone else get on board or get off. This is the way to create new stuff from scratch.

There needs to be one neck to choke when it comes to any situation or any problem. If I don’t know who’s in charge you lose one really powerful thing which is accountability.

Shaan Puri

What I say

Why it matters: Steve Jobs. Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos. They’re some of the greatest entrepreneurs of the last 50 years and led their companies with an iron fist. They stepped on toes. They zigged when others zagged. They were mavericks. 

Management books teach you how to build consensus and involve people in the decision making journey. This all stands true. This is the benevolent part. But, an undervalued ingredient of being a great entrepreneur is making bold decisions quickly. Jobs, Zuck and Bezos are all decisive. This is something all leaders should strive to be great at.

Between the lines: A lot of people have been wearing rose tinted glasses for the last 10+ years. When times were good, employees became accustomed to fancy perks and unlimited vacation.

Meta employees were outraged when they learned in March that they’d have to start doing their own laundry:

“Just minutes after the changes were announced, employees asked whether the company was planning to compensate them in new ways and if Meta had undertaken an employee survey to evaluate how the changes would impact the staff.”

New York Times article

This is just the beginning of employees working for their company, not the other way around. I believe companies will become significantly more demanding of their workforce in the coming years. Frugality and autocracy will become more mainstream in order to thrive. And those who don’t won’t survive.

BONUS theme

🧑‍🎤Word of the day: Showmanship

There’s a word that my trainer uses all the time. He says you’ve got to have a little bit of showmanship.

Showmanship is a word that for most of us doesn’t even enter our brain on a day to day basis.

He identifies the little moments where you can do something slightly different than the norm.

I do this with my daughter all of the time. We used to have such a hard time getting her to eat.

One day, my mother-in-law came over. My daughter’s milk bottle was way less. I asked her ‘How did you get her to drink the milk?’

My mother-in-law said ‘She loves to drink out of this little measuring cup instead of the normal cup. It’s a change of presentation.’

When I couldn’t get my daughter to eat vegetables, I created my own version of the show Chopped. I can get her to eat a whole meal if I’m willing to make a television show out if it.

This idea of showmanship keeps weaving its way into my life.

Use this as your word of the day. Find a way to weave a bit of showmanship into what you’re doing. Or change the presentation as we say.

Shaan Puri

I love this take. No isn’t always final. Was it a timing issue? Was it personality issue? Was it a presentation issue? Bring a bit of showmanship to the issues you’re willing to die on a hill for and you may just get what you want.

In 2020, Medicspot sold a technology solution to doctors. Doctors are infamously time poor. I needed to break through the noise and grab their attention. The answer? Add some showmanship. We used Lemlist, a tool that 10X’ed our cold emails by including a personalized video. We saw open rates of 57% versus an industry average of 15-25%.

💀 Friedberg bets that Coke and McDonalds will die

🥇 First place (3 min read vs 1 hour 15 mins listening)

David Friedberg shares his controversial views on content creators. These aren’t controversial for controversy sake. He’s not trying to evoke a strong reaction to get more clicks. Friedberg passionately believes consumer brands will die in the next 30 years if they don’t reinvent themselves.

What they say

Goodbye McDonalds, hello MrBeast Burger

I have a really strong belief that in the next 30 years or so, all traditional brands are going to die.

Individuals can scale an audience that can now be monetized in 1,000 different ways - not just putting fricking ad spots on YouTube.

MrBeast launched a chocolate bar and became the #1 chocolate bar in the country. He just opened a burger restaurant last week and it was the #1 restaurant opening in history.

Kylie Jenner launched a makeup brand and became a $1B brand. Kim Kardashian launched a clothing brand and it’s a $3B brand. These are not just brands. They’re businesses.

What we’re going to see is influencers build and distribute consumer goods and services in a more efficient way. They’ve got distribution built in, which is the #1 problem for consumer goods.

I’m talking about basic consumer goods. Cereal. Beverages. Food. Betting. All of the stuff that’s a commodity.

Every consumer packaged good or consumer services business needs to be a content business. If you don’t naturally have content creation in your blood, you have to buy a content business or you’re going to die.

What’s easier? Building an audience of 1 billion people who listen or watch you every week, or building a great burger? It’s much harder to build the audience.

Distributed content creation represents one of the most profound investing opportunities over the next decade.

David Friedberg

What I say

Why it matters: Early evidence suggests Friedberg may be right. There have been a lot of signals over the last couple of years where influencers have stepped on the toes of traditional consumer brands. Kim Kardashian isn’t the first celebrity to co-found a private equity firm. She simply gets more headlines than her predecessors, like Gwyneth Paltrow, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher.

It’s easy to write off this phenomenon as something only the ultra famous can pull off. But, the more influencers with a more ‘moderate’ following that build businesses on top of their personal brands, the more the naysayers will be proven wrong.

Between the lines: I disagree with Friedberg that this issue only impacts legacy consumer brands. I think undifferentiated B2B brands will also be affected by the rise of entrepreneurial influencers. Think about it. How loyal are you to Mailchimp or Trello? I’d guess at not very much. You’d consider switching if your favorite influencer launched a product almost as good.

HubSpot bought The Hustle for $20M+ and have aggressively created and marketed the HubSpot Podcast Network. a16z are building their own media empire. Incumbents, whether SaaS or VC, are already buying or building their own content machines to prepare for a world in which you die without an audience.

Shoutouts

When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, I’ll feature them here:

• A few times a year I escape from the world of business podcasts and dive into a science fiction book. Given this section has been dominated by fellow newsletter writers, I’m going to buy Red Rising, my favorite fictional book, for the first reader who replies with ‘Buy me a book, please’. Ready, steady, go!

Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.