“I can’t believe you’re giving away all these insights.” 🫢
I heard that more than once at the launch party for the 2026/2027 edition of Marketing Plan for Tech Startups. 🚀
- ✅ 300 founders signed up
- ✅ 60+ joined me on the rooftop of the San Francisco Compute Company office
- ✅ 6 bottles of champagne later we closed out TECH WEEK by a16z 🥂
What’s new: a chapter on Marketing in the AI Era, Part 2: Acceleration. It captures marketing as it stands in Q4 of 2026: what has changed as AI advances and which GTM fundamentals endure.
The thesis: when AI makes products easy to build, it also makes them easy to copy. What stays hard is winning the buyer, and now also the agent that researches and shortlists on the buyer’s behalf.
In the era of AI acceleration, GTM is the product
The chapter shows what designing GTM as a product looks like: a brand promise kept at every touchpoint, content built for humans and AI agents, pricing and partnerships designed around outcomes, the new roles and data that run GTM, and events that earn trust in person.
Thank you to the incredible leaders whose insights shaped the new book chapter:
- Cristina Stanley, CMO, DuckDuckGo
- Brian Goldstein, VP and GM of Strategic AI and ISV GTM, Google
- Mada Seghete, Co-founder and CEO, Upside
- Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, COO, Vercel
- Harikesh Nair, Senior Director of Data Science and Engineering, Google
- Maryam Zand, VP Ecosystems and Partnerships, Equinix
- Bruno Aziza, Group VP, Software, IBM
- Priyanka Vergadia, Founder at Cloud Girl
Huge thanks to Alan Butler and Mia Sullivan for hosting us at the gorgeous San Francisco Compute Company office!
Thank you for stopping by and raising a glass with me to awesome AI founders, operators and marketers: Jacqueline Minkler, Aleksandra Bury, Deepthi Rao, Muhammad Qasim, Nithin Reddy, Ted T., Emek Tuzun, and many more!
- 📘 Preview the book: ebook.techsurprises.com
- 📗 Grab your copy on Amazon: amazon.techsurprises.com
- 📕 Add a review on Amazon: review.techsurprises.com
You can also get the book at iconic San Francisco bookstores:
- 📚 Browser Books, 2195 Fillmore St.
- 📚 Smoke Signals, 2223 Polk St.
- 📚 Russian Hill Bookstore, 2161 Polk St.
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