Pipeline 002: The Trade Desk is worth a tenth of what it was in 2024. It's cutting 15% of its people this week.

Growth & Demand Gen

Hello. Well it's Sunday evening, and I'm claiming this time for myself. Here's what caught my eye this week.

The Trade Desk is now worth about a tenth of what it was worth in December 2024, and Jeff Green is cutting 15% of the company. Two years ago it was THE independent ad tech story. This week it's a lesson in what happens when the big platforms decide to take the budget back.

You can feel the same pressure inside marketing teams, if you look. Agencies are watching AI eat the billable hour and nobody's rewritten the contracts yet. Content teams are producing faster than ever and reporting their worst results in twelve years of surveys. The work's getting repriced, basically.

Doesn't mean nobody's hiring, mind - Wayve wants its first ever Head of Marketing, and Cognition's opening its first seat outside the US right here in London.

The Read

Why Wall Street Turned Against The Trade Desk

Industry · James Hercher, AdExchanger, 11 September 2026

The Trade Desk's market cap has fallen below $10bn, from roughly $70bn in December 2024. Jeff Green has announced a 15% workforce reduction. Hercher argues the real pressure is coming from three places: Amazon, Google and Meta pulling budget back in-house, connected TV consolidating around five players, and agencies going direct to media owners. Analyst Michael Nathanson put it well: "We never thought we would see a quarter and guide in a US election and World Cup-year like the one the Trade Desk just shared for 2Q 26." If you work in paid media, that's a quarter to remember.

AI reshapes agency economics, but their contracts are still scrambling to catch up

Industry · Kimeko McCoy, Digiday, 10 September 2026

Agencies have billed against hours for a century. AI is removing the hours and the master services agreements haven't caught up, so contracts are being patched piecemeal rather than rebuilt. One executive in the piece: "We'd rather stay with what's familiar and how advertisers are paying agencies for a century versus trying to change the game up by trying to be a SaaS company." It's a pricing story more than a layoffs story - but it decides how accounts get staffed, which decides who gets hired.

Content marketing success falls to 12-year low: Survey

Research · Danny Goodwin, Search Engine Land, 10 September 2026

Orbit Media surveyed 1,042 content marketers. Only 14% say their blog delivers strong results - the lowest in the survey's twelve-year run. AI adoption sits at 92.4%. Average production time per post has dropped to three hours twenty minutes, from over four hours in 2022. Collaboration with outside experts is down from 25% in 2017 to 7% now, and marketers who do collaborate are 2.6 times more likely to report strong results. Orbit Media is a content and web agency publishing research about content marketing, so read the "experts win" finding with that in mind.

AI Buying Platforms Will Manage 27% of U.S. Ad Spend by 2030: Report

Research · Christopher Cicchiello, Adweek, 11 September 2026

Madison and Wall forecasts the global ad market reaching $1.3 trillion by the end of 2026, up 11% year on year, with second quarter growth at 12.9%. The number that stuck with me is the 27% of US ad spend they expect AI buying platforms to manage by 2030. The report's other point - AI companies are now both the tooling and a large slice of the advertisers. Madison and Wall is an independent forecaster rather than a vendor in the category it's measuring.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas Job Cut Report, August 2026

Careers · Challenger, Gray & Christmas, 3 September 2026

August announced cuts came to 52,881, up 58% on July but down 38% on August last year. Year to date the figure is 529,914, down 41% on 2025. Technology is the heaviest-cutting sector at 155,126 so far this year - 29% of all cuts, up 52% year on year. The stated reason mix in August was restructuring 16,173, market conditions 15,260, closings 6,743 and AI 3,462. AI-attributed cuts fell after leading for five straight months. Challenger is an outplacement firm selling to the companies making the cuts, and the data is its own tally of public announcements rather than government figures.

It turns out that Gen Z didn't quit on careers. The workforce quit on them

Careers · Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 1 September 2026

MIT's Paul Osterman finds 35% of the American workforce - over 55 million people - hold what he calls disposable jobs. Gig work is only about 2% of that. The bulk is contracting and what he calls marginal employment - salaried people hired with an unspoken expectation that they won't advance or stay long. Glassdoor's Daniel Zhao agrees the attitudes haven't changed, the available work has. Osterman expects AI to push further in this direction through uncertainty rather than direct replacement. The coverage is tied to his new book.

Worker personality may matter more than skills, hiring managers say

Hiring · Kathryn Moody, HR Dive, 1 September 2026

Express Employment Professionals and The Harris Poll asked over 1,000 US hiring decision-makers about the bar they actually apply. 86% said the right personality could outweigh a gap in a candidate's skills. Hiring managers and job seekers named the same traits: reliability, honesty, adaptability, flexibility, self-motivation. A separate figure in the piece puts 78% of employers as having hired someone technically strong who then didn't fit. Express Employment is a staffing firm publishing research about hiring - bear that in mind.

One More Thing

Man Pretends to Hallucinate in Job Interview With an AI Bot, Causing It to Go Haywire

Joe Wilkins, Futurism, 5 September 2026

A satirist called Graham Zip sat an AI screening interview with an avatar named Dana Whitfield and answered entirely in nonsense - chick haversplat, two plumes of gauze, raccoon protocols. The bot didn't flinch. It synthesised the nonsense straight back at him: "It sounds like you're looking for a position where you can really lean into those raccoon protocols, and the plumes of gauze." Funny for about thirty seconds. Then slightly less funny once you remember you might be screened by one of these next.

For the Commute

Is the CMO Role About to Disappear Forever?

Marketing Against The Grain, episode 451 · Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan · 8 September 2026 · 34 minutes

Bodnar and Flanagan take the question seriously rather than as a headline. The expectations on the top marketing job keep rising, the skills feeding into it keep changing, and companies increasingly can't find anyone who matches the brief. The useful half is what firms do instead when the perfect head of marketing doesn't exist. Both hosts run marketing at HubSpot, so bear the vendor view in mind.

The AI-First CMO's Guide: What to Break, What to Build, What to Bolster

The Get · Erica Seidel with Suresh Balasubermaniam, CMO at Qualio · 20 August 2026 · 30 minutes

Balasubermaniam moved from a large-company marketing seat into a smaller, faster one, and flipped the usual change sequence - technology before people and process. There's real hiring content in here too: how to judge whether someone from a big company can genuinely handle the drop in scale and support. He also argues no CMO can now say of AI that "I have a team who handle that." Seidel recruits marketing leaders for a living, which is exactly why the episode is this candid.

Product Marketing

Hello. Well it's Sunday evening, and I'm claiming this time for myself. Here's a bunch of things I've found interesting, curious and worthy of a few minutes this week.

Let's start with Miro - they sold to Bending Spoons this week for $1.36bn. Sounds like a lot, right - but in 2022 it was valued at $17.5bn. It's profitable, it has $600m ARR, and has sold for a tenth of what it was worth at its peak. These Bending Spoons people - they bought Evernote and WeTransfer and they bargained hard. The lesson is that if you work somewhere that raised at 2021 prices and has grown into a good business - you might be next.

So who buys software now - why do they buy it, and - honestly, is it worth anything post-Saaspocalypse?

The Read

Bending Spoons Acquires Miro for $1.36B

Industry · Siobhan Fagan, Reworked, 10 September 2026

The deal is $1.355bn enterprise value against a 2022 peak valuation of $17.5bn. Some shareholders agreed to reinvest $295m into newly issued Bending Spoons stock, and the deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter. Fagan does make an interesting point here - Bending Spoons is a serial post-acquisition cutter, and this is its second unicorn in two months after Airtable, and Miro had already cut around 7% of its workforce in 2023 and a further 275 people in October 2024. So voila. Shoulda sold in 2022?

Adobe acquires Indian market intelligence startup Rilo

Industry · Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch, 2 September 2026

Rilo built workflow automation for go-to-market teams - competitor intelligence, content repurposing and distribution, sales call analysis. Basically, a chunk of the product marketing job, automated. Six people, roughly $10m valuation, backed by Peak XV, DeVC and Day Zero. Co-founder Dhruv Jaglan says more than 10,000 people had tried it (this is not a compelling statement, is it - I've tried snail porridge but I didn't go back for seconds). Rilo is shutting down and cutting off existing customers. Barely covered in the Western marketing press.

Salesforce Might Pay $2 Billion for This AI Company. Is the SaaSpocalypse Finally Over?

Industry · Brian Contreras, Inc., 10 September 2026

Salesforce is reportedly talking to buy Listen Labs for around $2bn. Listen Labs does AI customer research - design a study, push it out to tens of millions of consumers, get generated insight back. It was valued at $500m after a $70m Series B in January and claims fifteenfold revenue growth in the nine months before that. Clients named include Microsoft, Google, Nestlé and Levi's. If this closes, a fair bit of the research work sitting under product marketing just became a Salesforce SKU.

TabaPay eyes OCC charter with Denver bank deal

Fintech · Dan Ennis, Banking Dive, 2 September 2026

TabaPay raised $155m led by FTV Capital and is buying Denver-based Transact Bank, soon to be TabaBank. It expects to process over $100bn this year and is already the fifth largest card-not-present processor in the US by transaction volume. The point of the bank purchase is an OCC charter - direct FedNow and ACH access, rather than going through twenty partner banks and a pile of state licences. If you market payments infrastructure, keep an eye on whether owning a charter becomes the thing everyone claims next.

The Costly Gap Between Two Career Ladders

Research · Kellogg Insight, Northwestern University, 1 September 2026

Research by Nicola Bianchi, Lydia Cao, Benjamin Friedrich, Kieu-Trang Nguyen and Yifan Wu, using full reporting-chain personnel records from 43 firms. Individual contributors make up 82% of the average employee base. They're promoted 18% less often and see 17% slower pay growth. At the bottom of a hierarchy an IC earns about 32% less than a manager at the same level, and at the top that gap widens to about 63%. Only around 0.5% of ICs switch to the manager track in any given month, and those who do get roughly a 28% pay jump. Two caveats worth knowing - the data comes from Visier, a workforce analytics vendor, and the study counts anyone with one direct report as a manager.

Software buyers are moving faster than software sellers

Research · Constantine von Hoffman, MarTech, 4 September 2026

Two buyer studies here, and honestly, steal these numbers for your own deck. More than 80% of buyers used AI chatbots for software recommendations in the past two years, and those who did bought from their initial shortlist in at least three of their last five purchases 80% of the time, against 65% for everyone else. Finance's presence on buying committees rose from 31% to 46% in a year, and 49% of buyers say a CFO reversed an already-approved purchase. Evaluation is now the longest stage for 40% of buyers. The underlying research comes from G2 and Cleverbridge, both of whom sell into the process they're measuring, and the G2 half was first published back in late July.

From Oracle to Amazon: Tech giants drive global wave of layoffs in 2026

Careers · Rimjhim Singh, Business Standard, 11 September 2026

By 10 September the technology sector had cut 128,536 jobs across 299 companies - already past the 122,606 recorded for all of 2025. The first ten days of September alone accounted for more than 6,300 of that. Oracle 21,000 (13% of its workforce), Amazon 17,267, Dell 11,000, Meta 10,400, PayPal 4,760, Uber around 3,300. The piece puts roughly a quarter to a third of it down to genuine AI task replacement and the rest to over-hiring correction - and data centre capital spending just keeps climbing regardless.

One More Thing

Employees say only 60% of onboarding materials are necessary

Lara Ewen, HR Dive, 3 September 2026

Adobe asked more than 1,000 US workers who'd started a job in the last two years. They get an average of thirteen documents in week one and spend about twelve hours reading them. The top tenth get over thirty documents and 35 hours. Only 60% of it was judged necessary, 44% retained half or less, and more than 20% questioned whether they should have taken the job because of the onboarding. 38% were told nothing about their employer's AI policy. And yes - the research is by Adobe, a company that sells documents.

For the Commute

Define the Message and the Roadmap Follows, with Jamie Domenici, CMO of Klaviyo

The B2B CMO Podcast · Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan with Jamie Domenici, CMO at Klaviyo · 31 August 2026 · 36 minutes

Domenici went from marketing operations to the top job, took Klaviyo through its IPO, and repositioned it from email service provider to B2C CRM. She talks about the one bad billboard that started the whole category-naming exercise, and her own test for when a category's actually taken hold - customers saying it back to you, unprompted. The best bit is how she's restructuring her team right now, turning content editors into content engineers, and treating answer engine optimisation as its own line next to SEO.

Episode 78: Ryad Berkat, Making an Impact as a New Product Marketing Hire

This is Product Marketing · Louise Liu with Ryad Berkat, Product Marketing Manager at OpenClassrooms · 27 August 2026 · 17 minutes

Short, first person, and about the thing most PMM content skips - what you actually do in the first weeks of a job when nobody's told you what the job is. Berkat covers picking up competitive research, sales enablement and launch planning as a new hire, and where things got messy between teams along the way. Seventeen minutes - one leg of most commutes.

The Money - London

London rounds from the past three weeks, and what each one actually looks like from a marketing seat.

Jack & Jill, £30m, led by Air Street Capital

Reported 7 September 2026 by Sifted, from Companies House filings

AI agents that run hiring processes end to end. This is the only one of the London rounds building a marketing function right now, and it's doing it at the top. Open in London: VP B2B Marketing at £250,000 to £350,000 total compensation, and a Founding Community and Events Lead at £50,000 to £80,000 base plus equity, alongside four other founding go-to-market roles. One caveat on the money - this came from filings rather than a company announcement, Sifted reported £30m led by Air Street, and at least one other outlet reported the figure differently. Treat the number as reported, not confirmed.

Callosum, $100m seed, led by Atomico

Announced 20 August 2026, just outside the three-week window. Plural, DCVC and the UK Sovereign AI Fund also participated

Software that routes AI workloads across different models and chips. Founded last year by Jascha Achterberg and Danyal Akarca, and the first investment from the UK Sovereign AI Fund. It's the largest London round anywhere near this window, and it has seventeen open roles, all in London, all technical - inference engine, accelerator systems, ML research, evals, networking, physical infrastructure, security. Not one commercial or marketing hire. A hundred million dollars and no marketers tells you something on its own.

CloudNC, $20m Series B extension, led by Nimble Ventures

Announced 9 September 2026. Calculus, Entrepreneur First and Lockheed Martin's venture arm also in

AI software for CNC precision machining, with over a thousand machine shop customers. Seven open roles, and the go-to-market spend is going to the United States, not the UK - the commercial hires are an onboarding manager and a business development rep in Austin. There is a London-adjacent role titled Marketing Machinist in Chelmsford, which despite the name is a machining job. No London marketing, growth or product marketing seat.

AI Score, €4.6m seed, led by Fuel Ventures

Announced 4 September 2026. GALLOS Technologies and angels also participated

Tracking and governing generative and agentic AI use inside enterprises, with Magic Circle law firms and FTSE 250 companies as customers. Founded last year by Alex Harland, formerly of the NCSC, with Benita Tibb and Jonathan Kewley. The careers page says plainly they're hiring across engineering and sales. No marketing function yet, so nothing to apply for. Just one to keep an eye on. Enterprise AI governance is exactly the sort of category that needs a product marketer within a year.

Two honest notes. No London fintech round surfaced in this window at all, which is unusual. And Sifted and UKTN's funding feeds were both running behind when this was compiled, so one or two mid-sized rounds between 22 August and 2 September might be missing.

Seats - London

Klarna's CMO is leaving after nine years

Marketing Week, 18 August 2026

David Sandstrom departs in early 2027, after taking Klarna from 20 million to 120 million users and through a public listing. Klarna calls it a planned transition. No successor named yet, and the CFO is leaving in the same window. A CMO seat at a listed fintech opens roughly never.

Cognition is opening its first EMEA marketing seat in London

Live advert, posted late August 2026. Salary not published

The company behind Devin is hiring a Head of EMEA Marketing based in London. A US AI company putting its first regional marketing leader in London tells you more about this market than most funding announcements do. No salary on the advert.

Three more London chairs are being advertised right now

All three verified live on 12 September 2026. None publish a salary

Wayve is hiring a Head of Marketing to own global strategy for its AI Driver technology. Faculty posted a Head of Brand Marketing yesterday. The Guardian is hiring a Head of Performance Marketing at King's Cross, and that one closes at 6pm on 17 September - the only item here with an actual deadline.

The Money - New York

New York rounds from the past three weeks, and what each one actually looks like from a marketing seat.

Clay, $115m Series D at a $7.1bn valuation, led by Wellington Management

Announced 9 September 2026. CapitalG, Sequoia and Meritech also participated

AI go-to-market platform, 17,000 customers including Anthropic and OpenAI, and on its own account tracking toward $200m of annualised revenue. Valuation up from $5bn in January. The board carries 57 open roles, and the marketing and growth cluster is the deepest on this list: Growth Digital, Marketing Analyst, a Growth conversion-focused web developer, Growth Strategy Enablement and a Head of GTM Strategy and Ops. A few product marketing reqs were indexed by job aggregators recently and are no longer on the live board - assume those are filled and watch for the next wave.

Forus, $150m Series C at a $3bn valuation, led by Bain Capital Ventures

Announced 8 September 2026. Thrive, General Catalyst, Accel and Redpoint also in

AI agents handling prior authorisation, patient financial assistance and specialty pharmacy fulfilment, across all fifty states. Fifty-two open roles and every single one is in the New York office - the most aggressive hiring on this list. A whole Growth and Marketing function is going up at once: Event and Field Marketing Lead, Events Manager, Customer Marketing and Content Lead, plus a Product Marketing Lead at $200,000 to $250,000.

Savvy Wealth, $100m Series C at a $600m valuation, led by Halo Fund

Announced 9 September 2026

AI-native registered investment adviser, $9bn in client assets and around 150 advisers, doubled in a year. CEO Ritik Malhotra said part of the raise goes to sales and marketing, and the board backs that up. Four senior marketing roles open in the NYC office: Senior Product Marketing Manager at $165,000 to $200,000, Senior Manager Client Marketing at $183,000 to $221,000, Senior Manager Marketing Operations, and an enablement lead at $181,000 to $221,000. Hybrid, four days in.

Antioch, $32m Series A, led by Greylock

Announced 8 September 2026. A*, Category Ventures and BoxGroup also participated

Cloud-scale simulation for physical AI, so robotics teams can test in digital twins before touching hardware. Amazon's Ring is a customer. Five open roles in the entire company and exactly one is marketing. If you've wanted a ground-floor seat at a Greylock Series A, this is about as clean as it gets right now. No salary published, which for a New York role is a fair question to ask on the first call.

Blee, $20m Series A, led by Fin Capital and SMBC

Announced 8 September 2026. Y Combinator, Hannah Grey and Penny Jar also in

AI compliance review for marketing, product and sales material, with Expedia Group, SoFi, PayPal and NerdWallet as customers. Worth a look for one specific reason - Blee sells to marketing and brand leaders, so the marketing hires are also the buyer. The Product Marketing Manager role at $150,000 to $250,000 is explicitly the first product marketer and the second marketer overall, working directly with a Head of Marketing who says she's hiring for the PMM craft she doesn't have herself. Location on the advert reads United States rather than New York specifically.

Two that raised well and are hiring no marketers at all

Inspiren $70m Series C, 10 September 2026. RQD* Clearing $74m, 27 August 2026

Inspiren does AI monitoring for senior living and has raised $225m in total. It has five open roles, all remote engineering, operations and support, and none in New York. RQD* Clearing raised $74m led by Bain Capital Tech Opportunities and has two open roles in New York - an AML compliance officer and a general counsel. A clearing firm raises $74m and hires lawyers. The hiring signal here just isn't there, and saying so plainly is more useful than stretching for one.

Seats - New York

Hilton's global CMO steps down after sixteen years

Noor Adatia, Marketing Dive, 11 September 2026

Mark Weinstein is leaving to take a leadership role outside travel. He joined in 2010 as a senior marketing director, became CMO in 2020 and added the luxury brands in 2025, and grew Hilton Honors from 25 million to over 250 million members. No successor named. The company president also retires in early 2027.

Accenture takes Workday's CMO, which opens Workday's chair

Businesswire, 8 September 2026

Emma Chalwin becomes Accenture's CMO on 1 October, reporting to chair and chief executive Julie Sweet. She was CMO at Workday, and before that at Salesforce, Adobe and McAfee. Accenture had been running without a CMO. The more interesting vacancy now is the one she leaves behind - a $60bn enterprise software company without a marketing chief.

Four senior marketing chairs open in New York, with the salaries published

All four verified live on 12 September 2026

EliseAI is hiring a VP of Marketing at $275,000 to $350,000, in office four or five days, to build the team out. DualEntry wants a Head of Marketing at $250,000 to $350,000 base plus $100,000 to $130,000 of equity. Tracksuit is hiring a Head of Marketing US at $195,000 to $265,000, reporting to the CMO. Fox wants a VP of Digital Growth and Product Marketing at $206,000 to $250,000. New York's pay transparency law is doing more for this section than the trade press ever does.

Three Roles - Growth & Demand Gen, London

All three verified live against the employer's own job board on 12 September. None of these are mine. I have no London roles on at the moment (sorry, I'm working on it).

Performance Marketing Lead, Omnea

London · salary not published · posted 24 August 2026

The first person whose actual job is working out what produces pipeline. The advert's unusually straight about it - paid campaigns, the website and the social channels all exist and work to varying degrees, but nobody owns the question. You'd decide with the team how to deploy a six-figure annual ad budget. Omnea has raised $75m from Khosla, Insight and Accel, and grew ARR tenfold in eighteen months. Founding team previously scaled Tessian.

Regional Demand Generation Marketer, LangChain

London or Amsterdam · £95,000 to £125,000 plus equity · posted 11 September 2026

First demand generation hire for EMEA, the Middle East and emerging markets, with the US demand gen, product marketing and marketing ops teams behind you. That combination's rarer than it sounds - most first-in-region roles hand you the territory and nothing else. $125m raised at Series B from IVP, Sequoia, Benchmark, CapitalG and Sapphire. Seven years plus. Posted yesterday.

Head of Consumer Growth, SumUp

London · salary not published · advert updated 13 August 2026

A function that doesn't exist yet, with headcount to hire under you. Performance marketing, direct-to-consumer acquisition, merchant-led distribution, CRM, creative and content, across six European markets, with commercial ownership of channel mix, acquisition cost, incentives and forecasting. The bet underneath it is turning four million small merchants into a consumer acquisition channel. No published salary, which at this level in the UK is normal and still annoying.

Three Roles - Growth & Demand Gen, New York

Two of these are mine, and I've marked them. The third isn't, and I have no relationship with the company.

Founding Growth Lead, Converge

New York, on site five days · $170,000 to $225,000 base plus 0.5% to 0.8% equity · my role

Second go-to-market hire, building pipeline generation from zero, with pipeline as the actual measure rather than traffic or leads. Converge is an AI-native growth and data platform for direct-to-consumer and paid acquisition teams. The path written into the role is leading the marketing org within a year - which is either the appeal or the warning, depending where you sit. Reply to this email if you want the detail.

Founding Demand Generation Manager, Basis

New York, Flatiron, five days on site · $150,000 to $225,000 base plus equity · my role

First dedicated demand generation hire at a company deploying AI agents to do end-to-end accounting work. $100m Series B at over $1bn from Khosla, Accel and GV, 120 people heading to 200 plus by year end. Two very different motions to own at once - a white-glove account-based programme for large accounting firms, and a scalable outbound engine for in-house finance teams. Sole team member to start. Reply if you want the brief.

Growth, Digital, Clay

New York, hybrid · $140,000 to $190,000 plus equity · posted 24 July 2026 · not my role

Owns paid across Google, LinkedIn, Meta and beyond, into enterprise accounts, carrying a pipeline number shared with growth and sales. Not a first hire - it sits inside an existing growth team - but the channel mandate is genuinely zero to one. The advert wants someone who thinks in pipeline rather than impressions. Clay closed $115m at $7.1bn this week, which is the context for the budget.

Three Roles - Product Marketing, London

All three verified live against the employer's own job board on 12 September. None of these are mine. I have no London roles on at the moment.

Head of Product Marketing, Synthesia

London · salary not published · posted 26 August 2026

A team of five already in place, budget to hire into it, and the whole portfolio to own - video, interactive avatars, the API. The advert frames the job around one narrative problem: the avatars are becoming interactive, and that shift needs a story. $200m Series E, $4bn valuation, and over 90% of the Fortune 100 as customers. One thing to know before you apply - they want someone who has actually built and deployed agents and automated real parts of their own PMM work. There are also two Principal PMM roles open if Head of is a step too far.

Product Marketing Lead, Monzo

London, Cardiff or remote UK · £100,000 to £133,000 · advert updated 11 September 2026

Monzo is hiring several of these, so it's team expansion rather than a backfill, and it's a player-coach role. Read the advert properly before applying, because Monzo is upfront that its model is unusual - product marketing there is a product-market-fit discipline rather than a go-to-market one, embedded in squads with PMs, designers and researchers. If you've spent five years running launches and enablement, that's a different job. Named openings include the Wealth Collective.

Founding Product Marketing Manager, Omnea

London · salary not published · posted 28 May 2026, still live

First PMM in the company, hired to build the product and AI narrative for the Series B to C stretch, and to stand up competitive intelligence from nothing. The advert is blunt about the kind of person it wants - a structured operator with low ego who wants to execute rather than discuss strategy. $75m raised from Khosla, Insight and Accel. It's been open since May, which either means they're being fussy or the brief is hard.

Three Roles - Product Marketing, New York

Two of these are mine, and I have marked them. The third is not, and I have no relationship with the company.

Product Marketing Manager, Viktor

New York, Warsaw or remote US · $190,000 to $250,000 · my role

Founding PMM reporting to the founders at a company that hit $30m ARR in under four months after a $75m Series A led by Accel. Viktor is an AI coworker that lives in Slack and Teams and does real work. The job's positioning across several very different buyers, running every launch end to end, and arming a growing enterprise sales team against Glean, Harvey, ChatGPT Enterprise and Cognition. The competitive set alone tells you the level. Reply if you want the brief.

Product Marketing Manager, Basis

New York, Flatiron, five days in office · $150,000 to $225,000 plus equity · my role

First dedicated product marketing hire, building the function from nothing at a company putting AI agents into end-to-end accounting work for large firms. $140m raised, $100m of it a Series B, 120 people going to 200 plus by year end, and no direct competitor doing the same thing. A category with no incumbent narrative doesn't come along often. Reply if you want the detail.

Product Marketer, Antioch

New York, on site · salary not published · posted 11 August 2026 · not my role

Five open roles in the whole company and this is the only marketing one - so it's the first marketer in practice even if the advert never uses the word founding. You'd take a deep multi-vertical technical platform and turn it into a coherent narrative, own the website, social and voice, and work in tight loops with the founders and engineers. Greylock led the $32m Series A. Founding team came out of Tesla Autopilot and Meta Reality Labs. There's a positioning and writing exercise in the process. No salary published - in New York that's a fair thing to ask about on the first call.

Before you go

If you're open to a new role at the moment, talk to me. https://discord.gg/SJWgYzyez is our discord server, you are more than welcome (please don't share this, you have been carefully selected, even though the broadcast nature of this email may not make it look that way!)

Gareth