YouSaid · the spoken record

Krithika Shankarraman

lines on the record: 72
first: 2025-05-25
most recent: 2025-05-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Critics.com is where you'll find links to all of my online presences. And one of my personal missions this year is to meet as many of the up-and-coming marketing talents in the world. So anyone that you know is earlier career ambitious, but really showing their impact at their organization, please introduce them to me. I would love to chat.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My teams have now gotten tired of me saying this, but I say it all the time, which is the delta between expectations and reality is the function for unhappiness. And so it is much easier to change expectations than it is reality. And so I tend to spend a lot of my energy making sure that expectations are set, not just with customers when it comes to our external marketing, but internally with stakeholders, project partners, and even within the team so that they understand what are some of the trade-offs that we're making or why we're making certain decisions. So I could not espouse that philosophy enough.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Granola for meeting notes. I love taking meeting notes as a way to stay engaged in the conversation and to pay a lot of attention, but I also know I'm like furiously typing away. And so the ability to augment my notes and bullet points has been a game changer.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm really late to the game, but I'm finally catching up on Severin, so no spoilers, but I'm about halfway through the first season.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the professional side, one book that I recommend to most people is April Dunford's Book on Positioning called Obviously Awesome. She does a great job breaking down how to position a product from scratch if you've never had to do that. And she's just so great for her real talk. So really highly recommend that. And then I love fiction. So I would say one of the best reads in the last couple of years has been Madeleine Miller Circe, which is a retelling of a Greek myth. So lyrical prose, beautiful writing, highly recommend.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there's one thing that folks take away, I hope it is that they know that there isn't one clear answer to any of the marketing problems. It seems like there's a playbook for everything. There's a framework for everything. But the reality is the work is hard. You have to spend the hours and the time to really understand your customer. And there is no replacement for that. And there isn't going to be even with the advent of AI. The other part of it is to deeply understand your product as well. Like what are you bringing to the table? And not just your product, but your company's values, your unique approach that you're bringing to the table and really be intentional and thoughtful about that because in the absence of that, nothing is going to be a substitute to bring that combination of ingredients together.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It launched to a lot of fanfare but then eventually failed. Like it didn't produce the sort of revenue or the numbers that we had expected. And the understanding here was that as much as one side of the marketplace, or you might have some conviction that you need to put something into the market for a particular moment in time, the timing of the market really matters. And the timing of multiple parties coming together to make a platform work really matters. And so the learning here was like, we hadn't gone deep enough into the market dynamics. We hadn't done enough user research. Did people really want this? And if they did, what were their alternatives? What was the stacks that they were operating in? And would they adopt a net new tool versus one that integrated into existing systems directly, like their e-commerce inventory management systems and so on? And so for that reason, I think, again, it was ahead of its market and ahead of its time.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, this question's hard because there's so many things to choose from as potential examples here. And you're absolutely right, Lenny, in that most careers are not the sort of linear journeys that are reflected on somebody's LinkedIn profile. I'll talk about a fantastic success, which is called Stripe Relay, which you probably, I'm just kidding, because nobody remembers it. It was ahead of its market. We launched it back in 2014. It was supposed to be the platform with which e-commerce companies would tap into social commerce, you know, the buy buttons, if you remember that.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Otherwise, be available to you unless you're going deep into Google Groups archives or talking to people across the organization to pull out things that are inside of their brain. That kind of institutional knowledge being made more accessible by AI is actually more powerful sometimes than the tools themselves. And in fact, even at OpenAI, it's one of the things that we advised most enterprises to invest in first is their own operational efficiency rather than just the AI magic dust they could sprinkle on top of their product experience for their customers.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is hard to pick because there's not many things I don't use AI for these days. And oftentimes it's a catalyst and an accelerant to the work that I'm already doing. But I think I can actually unlock my ability to talk to dozens of companies across the Thrive portfolio in any given week. And the ability to get deep on their context, their environment, their competitive landscape, we can do that because of the tools and the products that Thrive has invested in from an engineering perspective. So we have internal tools that are driven with AI that give us a lot of insights and access to expertise for these companies so we can show up as more meaningful partners in a day-to-day basis. So I think the ability to mix AI tooling that accelerates work that you're already doing and then AI-based tools that unlock superpowers that wouldn't otherwise”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were two guiding principles here one is do people actually want to talk to sales before they get a self hosted thing and sort of like the SSO tax, right? Is that really the thing that you want to get your value on? And so that was one. And so we saw a lot of demand from smaller customers that still wanted self-hosted for a variety of reasons because they worked in regulated industries or they worked with very private data and PII. And so it wasn't just something that was, hey, if you have 10,000 employees at your company and you're an enterprise, you want self-hosted, it was that for a variety of different reasons, regardless of your company size, you might want self-hosted. So that insight kind of led us to say, hey, where is the delineation here? Because the sales team should be talking to larger customers landing larger deals. And so to align those two was one of the driving principles.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyone solved it, like there's especially with agents coming into play, like how you pay for AI workers is going to be very different, you know, what is that unit of completion for things like code generators is going to be a wild, wild west before we come up with something that is as internalized now as seed-based pricing or usage-based pricing.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no playbook, so I feel like it's such a non answer, but I think the real Something quite controversial, which is to take the thing that our sales team was gated on, a self hosted version of Retool, and made that available self-serve to anybody who wanted it. They didn't have to talk to a salesperson. And that kind of blew up the funnel, right? Because the amount of pipeline that the sales team saw had diminished considerably, but it also helped them focus upmarket on higher ACV deals. And so that trade-off was really hard to make. And so the only way we could do it was through experimentation and piloting to build conviction. So I would say AI is no different in that you kind of have to test the market to see what works. Is it a seed-based model? Is that where people are deriving value? Or is the way that they speak about the value of the product something quite different? Is it ours saved? Is it the amount of things that they could do now that they couldn't do before? And so there might be a metric there to go off of.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that stays with you into your career, right? Because you can either go into your career trying to get to that next ladder in the promotion rung, or you can get there to bring a genuine curiosity to what makes us different, what makes our customers tick, and how do we find those unique insights that can unlock something that nobody else has.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the mindset of learning has to be maybe the one that. We have to really imbue as a value because being of that growth mindset, if you go to school just to earn the grades or to finish the coursework, it's a very different mindset than if you go to school to learn those concepts and to understand how to apply them”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two schools of thought here. One is that sort of the domain, the discipline itself stays static and the way that you approach it changes over time. So whether you're going at it in a manual way or an automated way or an AI augmented way. But I think the other school of thought, which I more believe in, is that the discipline itself is changing. And so what it means to market a product, what it means to show up as a fantastic operator is in and itself changing. And so if you're not leveraging some of these tools, you will be putting yourself at a disadvantage. But understanding the underlying mechanics, you know, this is why I would still be a very firm believer in STEM education is that you understand the fundamental concepts. And then you can have a choice and optionality in how you decide to apply those concepts. But the concepts themselves have to be there in the foundations.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At Thrive, we have this share channel, which is Sharing things that we're seeing out into the world. It's not particularly deal flowed news or competitive news or anything like that, but it's things that we have seen that resonated with us for whatever reason.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take a step back, though. If anything taste is going to become a distinguishing factor in the age of AI because there's going to be so much drivel that is generated by AI can be generated by AI that power is at anyone's fingertips. But truly the companies that are going to distinguish themselves are the ones that show their craft, that they show their true understanding of the product, the true understanding of their customer, and connect the two in meaningful ways. If they can use AI to augment their efforts to make that happen, that's better than subsuming their efforts. So to build taste, there's plenty of past episodes that you yourself have recorded that get into building that work. But to me, that is going to be a real differentiator for not only great marketers, but great companies to stand out in the field.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's going to become so much more important. First of all, I will say I am not a chat GPT hyphen person. Like I was an M-dasher well before it became a chat GPT person.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is where AI can come in handy, you know, some of the most brand marketers can become very analytical. With the support of a tool like ChatGPT, if your eyes glaze over when you look at giant dumps of CSVs, it's nice to have a partner that is non-judgmental to kind of push your thinking and to help you understand the details of the data behind the brand work that you might be doing or vice versa, like if you're a very creative product marketer, a very analytical growth marketer, you can work with ChatGPT to be more of a brainstorm partner and really push your thinking on the creative side. So I think becoming a non-just T-shaped marketer is getting a little bit easier.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think this chameleon CMO concept is a bit of a novel one. Modern marketing leaders have to be really good at a bunch of different things. They have to be very analytical. They have to be best friends with the data science pod because they need to understand the impact of their marketing. They, of course, have to bring creativity, but it is in service to the buyer journey. It is in service to revenue goals and goals that they share with the sales team or the product team and so on. So marketing operating in a silo is no longer a real possibility. So the ability to diversify your interest, maybe going from T-shaped to comb shaped is probably the right approach here so that you can go deeper in different domains when it is useful for the company through the diagnostic that you do.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The conventional wisdom for many CMOs is to be like a T shaped marketer. And what that means is go deep in one of these pillars that we talked about, product marketing, demand marketing, brand marketing.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And playbooks for these companies, but rather be very deep in the trenches with them to understand their unique context, their unique concerns, their unique characteristics, and their values and what they want to bring into the world. The reason that they want to work with Thrive is not because we are bringing our past experiences to the table, but rather because they're trying to do something new that has never been done in the world. And so those are the engagements that are the most exciting is that you're building and going into uncharted territory alongside these founders.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really different method of operating. And so when you're in the leadership role for marketing within a single organization, you have at least a medium-term North Star in terms of what your teams are trying to drive for the company. And as much context switching as there might be, there is still one company, ideally one product, one buyer journey. That hasn't always been the case, especially with OpenAI and Stripe, but it can span B2C, B2B, B2D. Thrive is very different in that if you want to be a meaningful partner to the founders, you cannot just jump from 30 minute call to 30-minute call to 30-minute call. You have to go deep to understand the context. And if anything, it's really underscored my ethos that you as a marketer, the best thing that you can bring to the table is your adaptability and flexibility. So to really diagnose and not just try to spot patterns and themes.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Means being interim CMO for some portion of time until they find a great leader to fill that seat. Sometimes it means pressure testing their strategy and making sure that their growth targets are ambitious enough. Sometimes it means looking at a Figma file for a landing page that's going out the next day and making sure the words are as good as they can be. And that variety across a bunch of industries, a bunch of stages of companies, everything from a company that hasn't even been incorporated yet all the way to data bricks and Stripe and OpenAI when it comes to the types of organizations that we work with. And then yeah, the variety of domains can range from consumer to healthcare to defense to B2B SaaS to AI. So it is a variety pack in the best way possible.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, surprisingly, more people know about Thrive these days than used to even just a few years ago. And Thrive is a very unique type of investment company and sometimes when I made the leap, people used to ask me, oh, was this always in your ambition to make the leap into the investment side of the house? And I can honestly say it wasn't. But I think being at a firm like Thrive really gives you a very different perspective and it strengthens your ability to be a stronger operator, whether that's in marketing or go to market or strategic finance or whatever other pillar within the company there is. Thrive's mission is to be the most meaningful partner to founders. And so there's a lot of high concentration, high conviction investments each year. And Thrive is also unique in that. It's a network of builders. And so they are really pulling their investment strategies from having been founders themselves. So my role at the company is to help our entire portfolio with all of their marketing needs. So sometimes it”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For your discipline to have an impact on the trajectory of the company. And so when you have that kind of potent combination, it can really change your perspective on what's draining, what's energizing, but being very self-aware of what gives you energy is also very helpful to align with the needs of the company also.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a big believer of what Claire Hughes Johnson, who was CO at Stripe, used to share with us, which is there is a concept of a work-life blend and sort of making sure that you're working at a company that has three components. I think first and foremost is always people. So are the people that you're surrounding yourself with ones that push your thinking, who are kind, who are genuinely interesting people to spend your hours with because you're spending a vast majority of your time with them. The second to me is product, right? Like, do you go to sleep thinking about the product, waking up, wanting to put it into the hands of more people because you know it is going to be good for them or useful to them? That's something I'm not one of those marketers who can pick up any product and market it. I have to have that conviction behind the product itself. And then the third is sort of potential, right? Not just potential for the company to do well, but potential.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think challenging, of course, is just being at the eye of the storm, right? The eye of the eye of the hurricane. And so all eyes are on OpenAI at all times. And I think that is a good thing because of the ramifications of the product. But it also really raised the stakes in terms of how we operated and with what scrutiny everything that we did was looked at with.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Surprising thing that surprised me at the company was just the warmth and intellectual curiosity of my peers and leaders at the company and truly the sort of Commitment to the mission of making artificial intelligence that benefits all of humanity was not just lip service. It was something that was embodied day to day, the sort of questioning that happened, the sort of pressure testing that happened, the rigor with which products were developed, go-to-market strategies were developed was Bardna. And so that's something that I really admire. And it was a privilege to be a part of that organization.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess long story short, what I'm trying to say is that all of these companies have to think in a much more long-term oriented fashion because it's not about a race of the best chatbot and the best outputs. It's about how does AI become a positive force for humanity. And so that's going to take a lot of change management and a lot of collaboration between a variety of different organizations rather than just the companies themselves and the product experience itself. It's going to permeate every aspect of our lives, our personal lives, our academic lives, our work lives. And so to make that transformation happen, my hope is these companies are not super focused on just their competition and one-upmanship, but rather thinking about the paradigm changes that need to happen for Our society writ large.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that comes to mind is the orientation when it comes to large language models and AI in general is that we're just at the very beginning innings of this whole paradigm shift. And so every single week there's a new breakthrough in AI that comes out from some lab or the other. There's this one upmanship on point changes and eval numbers and so on and so forth. But I think to customers, the users of the product, the things that make it delightful are the same things that make any product delightful. And there's a sense of loyalty that builds up over time when there is a shorter and smaller delta between your expectations and your reality and where those expectations are exceeded, it is accretive to the brand and your loyalty to the product and where there is a negative delta that tends to be something that it really detracts.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“End all be all of like the discipline of marketing. And that's where the lowercase M marketing comes in, which is what do you stand for as a company? What is the storyline that you're telling as a founder when you're talking to the press, to the larger business community? And then it really is a whole company motion where the product team is thinking about how are we going to market, what are we going to market with? The sales team is figuring out what is the right ICP, the right customer profile that decision makers that we need to be reaching. And then it is this entire joining of the organizations to make that really effectively.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Differentiation in the market? How are you positioning the product? The second pillar for me is demand generation. So if you have much more of a sales-driven buyer journey in motion, how are you bringing the demand engines to bear so that your lead generation, your pipeline generation is staying really strong and solid? Or you might want to think about brand, right? Like you might want to think about community development as a big part of what you're doing as a company. So it really depends, but I think in all of these, you found a spark of product market fit before you're really going for it. The second for me is that you're distinguishing enough between capital and marketing and lowercase M marketing. And this is an important distinction I've learned over the years, which is capital Marketing, the marketing team, the marketing function of the company is responsible for those channels and artifacts and engines that are driving the funnel for the company, but they are not the”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first criteria is having tremendous product market fit, which is really important because you're throwing fuel on the fire. And you might be throwing different types of fuel on your particular fire. So one pillar for marketing that you have to think about is product marketing. So if you have a high velocity engineering organization and product organization that is putting out a lot of different features and your customers aren't able to keep track, maybe the engagement's not so high for some of the newer features versus some of the core features that you had in the past, a product marketer can really help bring a discipline of launch excellence and customer engagement.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many, many years. So OpenAI had been around for almost a decade as primarily a research organization. They had launched ChatGPT about a year before I joined, and so that was the first foray into saying, hey, our work is not just announcing research breakthroughs, it is about putting products into the market.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you've got to take that responsibility seriously because even with something like Stripe, we know that people are going to come try out things that we put out the door. And so we wanted to make sure that that met up to people's expectations. And same thing with OpenAI. When we launched something, even though we were trying to be first to market and that velocity was so important for the company, oftentimes it also came with sometimes putting the brakes on to kind of understand how can we improve the quality of the experience, how can we make sure that it is safe. So there were different criteria at the two companies, but a similar ethos overall for the brand experience that we wanted people to experience.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These or variety of touch points that touch so many different organizations and teams within your organization, they are the amalgamation that makes up your brand. And so if you think of these two things as separate silos, you are optimizing for the”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny because with the companies who value velocity Actually, do value their brand just as much. But oftentimes they think of these as two siloed, separate initiatives that they have to put their headspace and calories towards. And I actually think they are not mutually exclusive. They are actually very interconnected. And so when you understand the consistency of your brand, it actually empowers the organization to move faster because you kind of understand how you want the brand to show up in the world. What is that experience that you want your customers to come away with when they interact with your brand? And the brand is not just marketing artifacts. It is your product experience. It is how your customer support team talks to them, how they resolve tickets. Are you getting passed between a bunch of different teams or is someone just resolving your ticket right away? It's the experience that they have for candidates when they come to recruit at your company. So all of”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to accomplish? Who are we trying to do it for? And what is the rough approach that we're going to take if everyone feels comfortable with that, you come back at the 80% mark where you've done a lot of the work on the artifacts, the different types of teams that have to be involved and how do you take something to mark it in the first place? And the reason that I say 80% is sort of critical because if you come in at the 99% mark and you're just looking for a rubber stamp of approval, you don't really have the slack in the system to be able to make any changes, then that review was worthless. So come in at the 80% mark where you can still make some substantive changes before it goes out the door. And that served the purpose of consistency so that your brand is showing up in a consistent way to the audience. And two, it helps the rest of the organization learn from each other.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two simple processes that you could put into place today is one set up a forum called Marketing Review. This can be a live meeting that you host for an hour a week or it can be a Slack channel where people are posting things async or even an email alias where things get sent to. Have that be transparent to the rest of the organization. So anyone in the marketing team, anyone in the product organization can join that forum. What that does is it creates a fishbowl where you see sort of what are the themes that come out when somebody reviews a piece of content. Are they looking at the strategy? Are they looking at the audience? Are they looking at the words? Are they looking at the sort of design approach? So you learn through osmosis of looking at some of these discussions. And then I would say don't overdo it. I would say there are probably two checkpoints in a program that are really important to get aligned at. One is the 20% review. A 20% review is a strategy review.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years And the reason that I have that principle in mind is because it makes you kind of break out of your shell of I've been at this company for some time now. I understand the sort of unspoken rules of the organization. I've built up enough social capital that I can withdraw from to get something done. And I know which conference room to stand outside of to get the founder to review a piece of content before it goes out the door. That is not scalable. That is not sustainable. And so if you want somebody to be successful and contributing member of the organization very, very quickly, setting up some of these processes with the intention of trying to help them navigate how to go from idea to execution can be very empowering and powerful. Nobody wants to do the wrong thing. They want the guardrails to understand what great looks like at the company.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a hill that I would die on, which is that good process or sufficient process is actually something that speeds up a company rather than slow it down. It stems from this idea that we talked about a little bit, which is that marketing is an extension of your product. It's the first touch point your customers have with your product. And ideally, you're setting expectations there in terms of what they should expect once they sign up for the product or commit to a contract and start using it within their companies. When I think about that, consistency is really, really important. The other part, the other facet of why process is important is because especially as you're in hypergrowth companies, scaling teams is part and parcel, like what you're trying to do. And when you bring in someone new, you want them to be just as self-sufficient as somebody who's been at the company for two years. So in your second week, can you be as successful as someone who's been at the company for two years?”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That kept coming up. People were asking, hey, do you process subscription payments or recurring payments? Or can I pay people out with Stripe? And I was like, of course you could, but there's no reason you should know that because we don't tell you anywhere. So, yeah, that was a great way and a great program to figure out what content we should focus and prioritize.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was a great practice that existed at Stripe even before I joined, which is all new hires would do a support rotation just to build empathy with our customers, so users first was a very core operating principle for the company, and we spent about 20% of our time collectively talking to customers, talking to users, talking to non-users to understand their needs, their gripes about the product. That tradition, I think, continues to today. The support rotation specifically was such a fantastic fountain of understanding. Hey, like these are the areas that people are confused about. Again, I kind of mentioned the sort of cheat code of talking to your customers and using the language that they use to describe their problems as a shortcut to fantastic product marketing and messaging because it really tells you what are their pain points and how can you meet them where they are. You want them nodding their heads along as they're reading your landing pages. And so when I was doing the support rotation, there were thematic.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are definitely a company that zags when others zig. I still have my whiz socks, which have these beautiful 8-bit characters on them. Their branding really stands out in the sea of sameness in SaaS conferences.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that's definitely made me as very skeptical of most marketing channels and strategies and tactics. And so I would be one of the first people to say, is that really going to work? Like what developer is clicking on paid ads? Isn't a better thing that we could be doing for them, telling them to install ad block? And so I think that skepticism means that you just have a higher bar for the quality of the content, the substance of the content. You want to make sure that the marketing is as substantive and as crafted as the product experience itself.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially in hypergrowth companies, I think you have to run that diagnostic every three months, every six months in order to stay adaptable and flexible because those top level goals do change. At some point, we really have to figure out how to scale our sales function. We have to figure out how to scale internationally. And so being adaptable to that meant constant reprioritization and making sure that you were also hiring people who weren't super deep in particular disciplines, but having a team structure that was t-shaped. people who could be flexible to those needs of the company”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second chapter at Stripe was really starting to expand what a launch meant, right? So going from just putting out a blog post for people who were already subscribed to the RSS feed of the company versus thinking through, hey, how do we reach out to them through an email, through other channels? How do we really invest in this fanatical community that is getting so excited about the product experience? So we pull together developer experience as a function, built out developer relations to really have that community feeling and vibe. And then it was about starting to think through the multi-product ecosystem. So Stripe went from a single threaded payments processing company to one that had multiple different products and features for the audience and the user base. So then the work of marketing became how do you help people understand and navigate potentially this multi-product ecosystem and platform”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And so she had kept a hackpad, a secret hackpad away from the engineering team, which was all of the features and products that we had shipped but had never communicated to our customers about. And so the launch sort of ended with shipping the feature rather than communicating with the user. So the first chapter at Stripe was really just getting through that backlog and making sure that the ethos that the company changed to say, hey, your launch isn't complete until if you're just code complete, you have to actually ship it to the customer and make them aware of it. So usage became the Nord Star, engagement became the Nord Star rather than just the binary has it launched or not.”
2025-05-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source