Inside marketing at Stripe, OpenAI and Retool | Krithika Muthukumar (VP of Marketing at OpenAI, ex-Stripe, Retool, Dropbox, Google)

Krithika Muthukumar is a marketing veteran. She is currently the VP of Marketing at OpenAI where she was the first marketing hire. Before that, she was Head of Marketing at Retool. Her longest tenure was at Stripe where she was hired as the first marketer and scaled with the company over nine years, from a 60-person team to 7500+. She began her career in Product Marketing at Google and Dropbox.

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In today’s episode, we discuss:

• Marketing lessons from OpenAI, Stripe, and Retool
• The 3 pillars of Stripe’s approach to brand
• How to manage resource allocation as a marketer
• Adapting marketing strategy to different business models
• Advice for early marketing hires

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Referenced:

• Coca-Cola AI-generated wish card campaign: https://theprint.in/ani-press-releases/coca-cola-ignites-diwali-celebrations-with-unique-personalized-ai-generated-wish-cards/1840093/
• Cristina Cordova: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cristinajcordova/
• Gong: https://www.gong.io/
• Greg Brockman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thegdb/
• Kenzo Fong: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenzofong/
• Retool: https://retool.com/
• Stripe’s “Capture the Flag” campaign: https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/22/stripes-capture-the-flag-2-0-a-hands-on-contest-for-app-developers-to-test-their-security-know-how/
• Stripe Press: https://press.stripe.com/
• Stripe Sigma: https://stripe.com/us/sigma
• Tanya Khakbaz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanya-khakbaz-a725732/

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Where to find Krithika Muthukumar:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krithix/
• Twitter/X: https://x.com/krithix

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Where to find Brett Berson:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro

(02:43) Getting involved in Stripe

(05:37) Evaluating success in product marketing

(06:35) The 3 pillars of Stripe's approach to brand

(12:10) Managing resource allocation as Stripe grew

(17:22) How Stripe scaled taste

(21:30) Were Stripe reviews micromanaging?

(24:16) Marketing under founders with strong marketing skills

(26:44) Advice for early marketing hires

(31:52) Marketing at Retool vs Stripe

(33:59) Marketing to mid-market vs SMB vs enterprise

(37:02) Marketing programs that had an outsized impact

(39:59) Marketing horizontal vs vertical products

(43:20) Lessons from OpenAI

(52:22) Inside OpenAI’s recent website relaunch

(55:57) How OpenAI’s marketers use OpenAI tooling

(59:53) When to start hiring marketers

(61:34) How to screen early marketing hires

(66:39) The biggest influences on Krithika's career

(67:52) Outro