๐ 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 donโt have to.
This is the 26th edition ofย Best 3 Podcasts of the Week ๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ฅ,ย featuring Marketing Against the Grain, My First Million, and All-In.
What you need to know
๐๏ธโโ๏ธ How to think about marketing by company size
๐ Why you need a benevolent dictator
๐ Friedberg bets that Coke and McDonalds will die
Bonus theme
๐งโ๐ค Word of the day: Showmanship
๐๏ธโโ๏ธ How to think about marketing by company size
๐ฅ Third place (4 min read vs 43 mins listening)
Boy, do I have a treat in store for you.ย Hereโs 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 youโre 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 donโt 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 youโre early and mid stage, youโre scrappy. You make as much impact with as little as possible. Thatโs 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 canโt roll up their sleeves and get things done.
Be very, very clear what your marketing and business goals are for the next 12 months. Youโre hiring for that period of time.
Hopefully, that individual will scale and become someone that can continue to build the organization, but itโs okay if they canโt.
I see the mindset of โWe tried that but it didnโt work.โ 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 youโre testing. A channel may not have worked because the messaging was off. People are too quick to toss things out because theyโve โdone itโ before.
Sumaiya Balbale
Series C, D, E priorities
What makes a great CMO at this stage:
Do good people want to follow them?ย
Do they understand the business? They canโt be so functionally focused in their thinking. They need to be a holistic business partner to you.
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 youโre out. You need to put more chips on the table to find the next opportunity.
A CMO needs to say โIf you want me to climb the next mountain, this is what Iโm going to need, versus this is what youโve given me.โ Thatโs the leadership shift that happens.
Sumaiya Balbale
What I say
Why it matters:ย Although Sumaiya wears a VC lens, her advice is still applicable for bootstrapped founders. The only difference is the weight youโd 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 whatโs going on with the rest of the business, and more ruthless with their priorities.
Between the lines:ย Experience is less important until youโre 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:
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.
Take accountability.ย 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.
Exceptional communicators.ย They give everyone they work with the context needed to do their job and empower colleagues to take on responsibility and move quickly.
๐ Why you need a benevolent dictator
๐ฅ Second place (4 min read vs 1 hour 3 mins listening)
Every project needs a leader.ย Without one, decisions get delayed. This invariably leads to ambiguity, infighting, and compromise to the point that nobodyโs 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
Iโm 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.
Weโre going on their ship and weโre either going down or weโre going to the promised land.
Thatโs 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 canโt be constantly torn by one group wanting A and another wanting B.
In companies, you actually need a dictatorship. People arenโt often comfortable with that because itโs not what you want with your country.
You want a dictatorship on any creative project. You want a crazy genius whoโs 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 donโt know whoโs in charge you lose one really powerful thing which is accountability.
Shaan Puri
What I say
Why it matters:ย Steve Jobs. Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos. Theyโre 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.ย
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:ย 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 theyโd have to start doing their own laundry:
โJust 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.โ
This is just the beginning of employees workingย forย 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 donโt wonโt survive.
BONUS theme
๐งโ๐คWord of the day: Showmanship
Thereโs a word that my trainer uses all the time. He says youโve got to have a little bit of showmanship.
Showmanship is a word that for most of us doesnโt 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 daughterโs milk bottle was way less. I asked her โHow did you get her to drink the milk?โ
My mother-in-law said โShe loves to drink out of this little measuring cup instead of the normal cup. Itโs a change of presentation.โ
When I couldnโt 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 Iโm 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 youโre doing. Or change the presentation as we say.
Shaan Puri
I love this take. No isnโt always final. Was it a timing issue? Was it personality issue? Was it a presentation issue? Bring a bit of showmanship to the issues youโre 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 10Xโed our cold emails by including a personalized video. We saw open rates of 57% versus an industry average of 15-25%.
๐ Friedberg bets that Coke and McDonalds will die
๐ฅ First place (3 min read vs 1 hour 15 mins listening)
David Friedberg shares his controversial views on content creators.ย These arenโt controversial for controversy sake. Heโs 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 donโt 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 itโs a $3B brand. These are not just brands. Theyโre businesses.
What weโre going to see is influencers build and distribute consumer goods and services in a more efficient way. Theyโve got distribution built in, which is the #1 problem for consumer goods.
Iโm talking about basic consumer goods. Cereal. Beverages. Food. Betting. All of the stuff thatโs a commodity.
Every consumer packaged good or consumer services business needs to be a content business. If you donโt naturally have content creation in your blood, you have to buy a content business or youโre going to die.
Whatโs easier? Building an audience of 1 billion people who listen or watch you every week, or building a great burger? Itโs 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:ย 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 isnโt 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.
Itโs easy to write off this phenomenon as something only the ultra famous can pull off. But, the more influencers with a more โmoderateโ following that build businesses on top of their personal brands, the more the naysayers will be proven wrong.
Between the lines:ย 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? Iโd guess at not very much. Youโd 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, Iโll 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, Iโm going to buy Red Rising, my favorite fictional book, for the first reader who replies with โBuy me a book, pleaseโ. 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.ย 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.