lifecycle-marketing
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Chris Hexton and the value of starting over
An invoicing idea brought Chris Hexton to Startmate. Letting it go led to Vero - and a career spent asking what customers actually need, even when the answer changes the business.
Gina Perrelli
Gina Perrelli is the co-founder and CEO of Stay AI, a subscription and retention platform for Shopify brands that treats subscriptions as a performance channel rather than a payment mechanism. A self-described 'retention girlie' with over a decade in lifecycle marketing, she previously co-founded the ecommerce agency Lunar Solar Group and now leads a company that helps hundreds of DTC brands - including Olipop, Vita Coco, and Momofuku - reduce churn and grow subscriber revenue. Stay AI raised $15.1M in Series A funding and has expanded through acquisitions of RetentionEngine and Bellwethr.
Neha Mittal
Neha Mittal is the CEO and co-founder of JustAI (formerly Just Words), a Y Combinator W24 startup in San Francisco building an AI-first marketing engine that continuously writes, tests, and optimizes copy across email, push, SMS, and landing pages. Before founding the company in 2024, she led Retention and Growth product teams at Pinterest and Twitter, where a single notification tweak - changing "Elon tweeted" to "Elon just tweeted" - added roughly 800,000 users and planted the seed for her company. A computer engineer turned product leader, she earned a master's at UC Berkeley's School of Information and has raised about $2.2M in seed funding from Cloud Capital, Peak XV Partners, and Y Combinator.
Paul Meinshausen
Paul Meinshausen is the CEO and co-founder of Aampe, a San Francisco company that deploys agentic AI infrastructure so consumer apps can learn from each user's behavior and adapt their messaging in real time. An anthropologist turned data scientist who started his career in US Army Intelligence, he co-founded the Indian fintech PaySense (acquired by PayU for $185M) before building Aampe with collaborators he first met in a military analysis unit. He argues that businesses win not by understanding the past but by making better decisions about the future, and that personalization should be about responsiveness rather than prediction.
Brett Browman
Brett Browman is a Growth Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, bringing a hands-on, ER-doctor approach to diagnosing and scaling portfolio companies. A veteran of Silicon Valley's most storied growth stories - first growth hire at both Square and Opendoor - he spent seven years as Operating Partner at Andreessen Horowitz advising companies like ElevenLabs, Character.ai, and Luma.ai before joining Khosla in 2024. Known for getting in the trenches as a fractional growth leader, Browman has helped shape the go-to-market playbooks of some of the fastest-growing startups in tech history.
Ashley Faus
Ashley Faus is Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio at Atlassian, a keynote speaker, Stanford instructor, and author of 'Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI' (Kogan Page, 2025). She's best known for the 'Content Playground' framework - rejecting the linear marketing funnel in favor of a non-linear, audience-driven content ecosystem. A former musical theater major turned B2B marketing strategist, she argues that trust is the one thing AI cannot automate, and has built a career proving it.
Val Geisler
Val Geisler is a lifecycle marketing strategist and VP of Partner Programs at Digioh, best known for founding Fix My Churn and creating the 'Dinner Party Strategy' — a behavior-driven email onboarding framework that has powered 209% conversion lifts for SaaS and ecommerce brands. With 12+ years at the intersection of customer empathy and marketing systems, she has built advocacy programs at Klaviyo, grown retention email to 25% of company revenue at ByHeart, and hosted the Ecommerce Marketing School podcast. Her philosophy: emails are relationships, not broadcasts.