startup-marketing
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The Marketing Department Designed to Disappear
Most agencies are paid to remain indispensable. Department of Growth has built a stranger proposition: join the client, build the machine, and then hire itself out of the job.
The PR Agency That Learned to Say No
HeadStart began as a PR shop for any startup with a pulse. Then it made the decision young agencies resist: fewer kinds of clients, deeper kinds of knowledge, and evidence that attention can be engineered without pretending every company is news.
The Agency That Put Mashed Potatoes in a Blender
Spool built a people-first PR agency, then proved its taste for odd ideas with Thanksgiving smoothies, pocket-filled jeans and whisper-quiet pickleball paddles. The joke is visible. The operating discipline underneath it is not.
Firebrand’s Clever Bet: Make Every Marketing Channel Feed the Next
The San Francisco agency stopped treating PR, search, content and paid media as neighboring departments. Its wager is that one sharp idea, passed intelligently from channel to channel, can beat four disconnected campaigns.
VSC knows your product. But where’s the story?
The San Francisco communications firm turns technical detail into something people can repeat. Its more revealing trick is what happens after the headline: recruiting, sales, and sometimes a place on the cap table.
StrtupBoost Has 30,000 Members. Its Next Bet Is a Smaller Room.
The New York startup community pairs investor introductions with the unglamorous work of sales, design and fundraising preparation. Its latest pitch: fewer people at the table, more reasons to talk.
Holly Hamann Keeps Choosing the Market Before It Has a Map
Before influencer marketing had a name, Holly Hamann helped build its machinery. Now the mathematician-turned-marketer is applying the same appetite for unsettled territory to AI, learning, and the stubborn question of whether training changes what people can actually do.
Grayson Leverenz Learned Scale Backwards - Then Built a Better Way Forward
She went from managing a $14 million brand budget to helping a startup grow with paid media below 1% of revenue. Now the former Spiffy CMO is teaching lean teams how to make strategy and execution share a desk.
Netscape Alumni Built Sparkpr. Now an AI Brain Helps Run the Pitch Room.
Born in Netscape's afterglow, Sparkpr has spent 27 years translating complicated technology into stories people can repeat. Its latest experiment is to encode some of that instinct in an AI system called The Brain.
Hannah Russin
Hannah Russin is Chief Marketing Officer at Troubadour Goods, the London-based maker of performance bags and leather accessories. A startup-veteran growth marketer, she co-founded the customer-acquisition consultancy DataScore, which Lyft acquired in 2017, where she went on to run growth programs. She later led marketing as CMO at Embark Veterinary and at the metabolic-health company Signos before crossing the Atlantic to take the marketing helm at Troubadour.
Why AI Doesn't Recommend Your Startup
A field guide to a quiet problem: when a customer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for the best tool in your category, your startup never comes up. This story breaks down the five reasons AI models skip you - missing authority signals, sparse public information, weak documentation, few third-party mentions, and inconsistent messaging - and lays out how to fix each one. The core idea: AI doesn't invent authority, it reflects it. If the open web doesn't clearly, consistently, and repeatedly describe what you do, the model has nothing to recommend.
Chang Li
Chang Li is the Marketing Partner at Greylock Partners, the storied Silicon Valley venture firm behind LinkedIn, Airbnb, and Workday. An electrical engineer turned marketing strategist, she has spent her career translating deeply technical products into market-defining narratives. Before Greylock, she helped HashiCorp manage pricing and monetization across a $500M+ ARR portfolio, then led product marketing at Metronome where she helped define usage-based billing as an emerging software category. Now she brings that zero-to-one positioning expertise to Greylock's founders at the exact moment it matters most.
Margit Wennmachers
Margit Wennmachers is the Operating Partner who built Andreessen Horowitz's brand from the ground up, transforming a16z from a new fund into the most recognized name in venture capital. A German immigrant who co-founded OutCast Communications in 1997 and grew it into a powerhouse PR firm serving Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix, she joined a16z in 2010 and pioneered a direct-to-audience content strategy that gave the firm an outsized voice in tech. She was the force behind Marc Andreessen's seminal 'Software is Eating the World' op-ed and spent 15 years shaping how founders, investors, and the world think about a16z.
Shannon Bendall
Shannon Bendall is the Marketing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she builds marketing programs for the firm's Venture Fund and serves as a communications and brand advisor to portfolio companies at every stage. Before a16z, she was the second communications hire at Snap, shepherding the company through its advertising platform launch, the Discover content hub, and augmented reality Lenses - all while the headcount ballooned from 100 to thousands and the company went public. She is based in Los Angeles, having relocated from the East Coast over a decade ago.
Shari Doherty
Shari Doherty is the Marketing Partner for Crypto at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads brand and marketing for one of the most influential crypto investment firms on the planet. With two decades of marketing and communications experience spanning Danger Inc., Google Android, Uber, Atomico, Essential, and Amazon Smart Home, she has helped define how some of tech's most iconic products tell their stories. At a16z crypto, she's doing it again - this time for the next internet.
Stephanie Zinn
Stephanie Zinn is Editorial Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads editorial strategy and audience growth across Substack, X, YouTube, and search. With over a decade in tech editorial, she previously built editorial teams from scratch at Coinbase and GitHub - generating 15M newsletter subscribers at Coinbase and launching GitHub's influential ReadME Project. She is one of the rare operators who treats clear writing not as a nice-to-have but as a core business asset.
Sean Ellis
Sean Ellis coined the term 'growth hacking' in 2010, invented the 40% product/market fit test, and served as the first marketer at Dropbox and Eventbrite. Founder of GrowthHackers.com (1.8M members) and co-author of 'Hacking Growth' (750,000+ copies, 16 languages), he is arguably the single most influential figure in the modern growth discipline - the person who gave the industry its name, its frameworks, and its operating system.