On the heels of my Marketing Plan for Tech Startups launch during TECH WEEK by a16z, I had the joy of hand-delivering copies to some of the people who shaped my marketing journey: teachers, mentors, and icons whose ideas live inside these pages.
At Stanford University Graduate School of Business, I sat down with Professor Baba Shiv, whose groundbreaking research on the neuroscience of decision-making forever changed how I think about marketing. He taught me that 95% of our decisions are driven by emotion, not logic — a truth that still holds in B2B, even when the stakes involve multi-year contracts and enterprise deals.
Stanford GSB: With Prof. Baba Shiv this week (2025) and the cohort of the Innovative Technology Leader program (2023)
AtGoogle , I met with Jeanine Banks whose leadership at Google Developer X taught me what it truly means to innovate inside a large organization. Working for Jeanine was a career highlight for me and her ability to bootstrap new initiatives and help teams “execute and win like a startup” inspired many of the ideas I share in the book.
Google: With Jeanine Banks this week (2025) and during my Noogler orientation (2018)
And at Y Combinator, I caught up with Pete Koomen, Partner at YC and Co-founder of Optimizely, one of Silicon Valley’s great success stories. His Startup School talk on enterprise sales remains one of my favorites, and key lessons from that lecture made their way into this book.
Wth Pete Koomen at Y CombinatorPete’s quote for the Marketing Plan for Tech Startups
Every stop on this tour felt like a full-circle moment: celebrating the people and ideas that helped build the foundations this book stands on.
Where shall I make the next stop on the book tour?
I’m still on cloud nine after three incredible book launch events during TECH WEEK by a16z. Seeing Marketing Plan for Tech Startups in the hands of its first readers felt surreal.
Across the week, I met founders, marketers, and innovators who share a belief that marketing must be part of product creation from day one.
Each conversation reminded me why I wrote this book: to help builders turn innovation into adoption, and adoption into revenue.
Book by the Numbers
The Marketing Plan for Tech Startups is your trusted companion for moving from product idea to adoption and revenue with confidence.
Startup founders will gain clarity on priorities and next steps when it matters most.
Marketing executives will get a timely gut check to align teams and accelerate growth.
#1 New Releases in Direct Marketing on Amazon
✅ #1 New Releases in Direct Marketing
✅ 3 timeless marketing axioms
✅ 3 book launch events at SF TechWeek
✅ 18 elements of a complete marketing plan
✅ 30+ expert contributors from global tech leaders
✅ 60+ brands and products featured
✅ 300+ startup founders and marketing leaders RSVP’d for the launch
3rd Event 🚀🚀🚀: The Official Book Launch
📅 Friday, Oct 10 | Official Book Launch at Contentful’s SoMA office
300+ Startup Founders and Marketing Leaders RSVP’ed to the Official Book Launch Party
As a marketer, I believe in drinking my own champagne: staying hands-on with the product, engaging directly with customers, and implementing what I advocate for in the book. That’s why I chose to launch Marketing Plan for Tech Startups during the Tech Week conference, attended by my ideal readers: founders and marketing leaders passionate about innovation.
In the book’s chapter on positioning, I quote Brian Chesky:
“Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.”
That principle guided my launch: starting small and creating genuine connections with early adopters before scaling. And what better place to engage directly with readers than the largest distributed conference in Tech?
Still, I didn’t expect such an overwhelming response. Over 300 Tech Week attendees signed up for the launch. 🫢
Even after years of designing and hosting events for major tech companies, this one felt different.
1000+ Women Leaders RSVP’ed to “Women in AI” Event at Chief
AI is lowering the barriers to innovation, and women are leading the charge. At Chief, I had the honor of joining Joyce Chen, Monisha Somji, Elaine Wah, and Susan Chu to discuss how women are shaping the next wave of AI.
As someone who studied computer science and began her career as a software engineer, I was often the only woman in the room. Seeing AI open the door for more voices — especially women’s voices — feels deeply personal. The event at Chief made that shift visible: a packed room and 900+ people on the waitlist.
The AI era does not shrink marketing’s role. It expands it.
For too long, marketing has been narrowed to campaigns and promotion. But with AI, we now have the tools to reclaim the full scope across product, price, place, and promotion.
There’s never been a better time to be a marketer than in the era of AI.
1st Event 🚀: Funded Female Founders
📅 Monday, Oct 6 | Startup Grind: Female Founders backed by YC
The Book Debut: Funded Female Founders Event with Startup Grind
On the first day of SF TechWeek, at a female-founders event, a VC said she’s no longer investing based on technical depth alone. She’s investing in founders with a clear go-to-market plan.
That insight resonated deeply, and it’s exactly why I launched 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩𝐬 during Tech Week. When the barriers to building lower, your go-to-market plan is what turns great tech into a great business.
With Gratitude
Thank you to everyone who showed up, shared ideas, and helped this book lift off.
In mathematics, axioms are self-evident principles. They’re the foundation on which more complex theorems are built. Take calculus, my favorite branch of math. It starts with a handful of assumptions: space and time are continuous, limits exist, and change can be quantified. If you know how fast something is changing, you can figure out how much it’s changed — and vice versa. From there, you unlock entire worlds: rates of growth, accumulation of value, and optimization. Sounds a lot like marketing, doesn’t it? 😉
In marketing, axioms serve the same role. They help you recalibrate when markets shift, competitors surprise you, or new technologies (like gen AI) change the game.
The Three Axioms of Marketing
Over the years, I’ve returned to these three core axioms again and again, applying them through every tech wave from mobile to AI while working across startups and Fortune 100 companies in both Europe and Silicon Valley.
Axiom 1 – Scientific precision
For every product there exists exactly one clear positioning statement that links its unique capability to a concrete customer need.
The most effective marketers approach their product’s positioning statement as a discovery process, not guesswork. Positioning requires rigorous market analysis, a deep understanding of buyer personas, and an honest comparison to alternatives. When done correctly, positioning defines the North Star for the business and keeps Marketing, Sales and Product in sync and united.
To see scientific precision in action, let’s look at a fresh positioning example from the autonomous ride-hailing market. Waymo ’s trajectory shows how clear market definition and targeted messaging can carve out a profitable niche even in a highly competitive space.
Example of a positioning statement inspired by Waymo (San Francisco, August 2025)
In 2025, Business Insider and Reddit discussions revealed that Waymo rides cost about $5–6 more than Uber or Lyft, yet many riders valued the extra comfort, reliability, and privacy enough to pay the premium.
Without precision here, marketing risks scattering its efforts, diluting the message, and missing the target entirely.
Axiom 2 – Emotional storytelling
In every purchasing decision, emotion precedes reason. Marketing must first evoke feeling so that logic can later validate the choice.
Baba Shiv, a revered Marketing Professor at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, once stated, “Nearly 95% of our decisions in life are rooted in emotion—not logic.” You might wonder if this applies to business-to-business transactions, like enterprise software sales. The answer is a definite “Yes!
In the mid-2000s, Cisco ran its “Self-Defending Network” campaign to position its IT security solutions as proactive, intelligent defenders of an organization’s assets. Rather than focusing solely on firewalls, intrusion prevention, or encryption standards, Cisco told stories of real people whose work and reputations were safeguarded because the network stopped threats before they could cause harm.
Cisco’s The Power of The Network Campaign
If you’re an enterprise sales executive, you probably realize that customers often decide in favor or against your product early in the sales cycle. What follows is essentially an opportunity for the customer to validate their initial decision. This phase involves testing your product, examining ROI calculators, or seeking peer reviews to gain confidence in the choice they’ve already made.
In summary, customers make decisions emotionally and then rationalize them.
Axiom 3 – Relentless consistency
Repeated delivery of a coherent message compounds its impact over time, while inconsistency diminishes effectiveness toward zero.
Consistency turns your positioning into a memory imprint. Each content interaction, ad view, and social media conversation must reinforce the same promise.
This is about disciplined alignment: sales decks matching web copy, product announcements echoing the same value proposition, and customer success stories reinforcing the same themes.
Over months and years, consistency builds trust and recognition in ways no single campaign can match. Break the thread too often, and you start again from zero.
Vanta ’s years-long commitment to podcast advertising shows how repetition in the right channels compounds over time. Starting in niche security shows like This Week in Startups and CISO-focused podcasts, and expanding to mainstream business podcasts such as Acquired, The Daily, (my personal favorite: The AI Daily Brief by Nathaniel Whittemore), and The Diary of a CEO, they’ve kept the core message intact. The result: thousands of sales conversations where prospects bring up hearing about Vanta “all the time.” That’s consistency turning positioning into muscle memory.
In their CMO Scott Holden‘s own words: “Vanta gets a lot of attention for our billboards, but podcasts are a massive lever for us too. We’ve been advertising in them since 2018. (…) All those demo requests that sales loves begin higher up the funnel.”
Vanta advertised for years on podcasts for their target audience: CISOs who’s spend 100s of thousands of dollars on their security software
From Calculus to Product Launches
These axioms have guided me across decades of tech shifts:
2000s – Mobile Internet. At Nokia, I built software tapping directly into telecom APIs, turning raw network data into useful services I then helped take to market for clients like Vodafone, Telenor and TIM.
2010s – Cloud Computing. At Cisco and Riverbed Technology I distilled the value of cloud computing before it became the backbone of digital transformations at Fortune 500 enterprises.
2020s – Data Analytics and Gen AI. At Google, I crafted portfolio-wide narratives for data and AI products and enabled 13,000 sellers to tell those stories effectively.
2025 – Edge and Agentic AI. At Synadia a cloud-native startup, I repositioned middleware into a full-stack edge AI platform: a key enabler for agentic AI at the edge in retail, automotive and manufacturing.
The Marketing Axioms in the AI Era
Marketing a category-defining product (gen AI, self-driving cars, or the next leap in biotech) is like solving a math problem no one has worked out before.
There’s no answer key. But the path forward still starts with fundamentals.
In AI-powered marketing today, that might mean taking a single high-performing message and using AI to instantly create dozens of localized, role-specific, or vertical-tailored variations. The goal is to preserve the original emotional heartbeat and positioning clarity.
Final thought: In both math and marketing, axioms don’t give you the full solution. They give you the foundation that makes finding it possible.
Turning Innovation Into Revenue
If you enjoyed this post and would like to continue the journey into the three axioms of marketing, I have exciting news: 10 years after publishing my Marketing Plan for Tech Startups template (which reached more than 100k readers) I’m turning it into a full book:
As a technology marketer, I’ve witnessed the Gen AI revolution from its inception. In early 2023, I crafted an enterprise narrative for Google Cloud, helping our global salesforce inspire customers to adopt this technology. I’ve seen AI evolve significantly: from chatbots writing silly poems to answering medical questions and guiding students in physics. Today, AI can understand, reason, and create across various inputs like text, images, audio, and video. I’m excited about AI’s potential to accelerate marketing innovation.
Now, as the VP of Marketing at Synadia, the startup on a mission to connect the world, I’ve observed even more. At a recent webinar for 50+ portfolio companies at Forgepoint Capital, I shared these insights, which I’m highlighting in this week’s newsletter. Thank you Tanya Loh for the opportunity!
As a technology marketer, I’ve witnessed the Gen AI revolution from its inception. In early 2023, I crafted an enterprise narrative for Google Cloud, helping our global salesforce inspire customers to adopt this technology. I’ve seen AI evolve significantly: from chatbots writing silly poems to answering medical questions and guiding students in physics. Today, AI can understand, reason, and create across various inputs like text, images, audio, and video. I’m excited about AI’s potential to accelerate marketing innovation.
18 months ago, I visualized gen AI as my alter ego, a game changer amplifying our strengths and overcoming our weaknesses. I hoped that for creative and curious people who tend to procrastinate and get bored easily, Gen AI would make life easier by handling the repetitive and mundane tasks we dislike.
Gen AI amplifies many our strengths and overcomes our weaknesses
Today, I can say that my prediction turned out to be true. I see three main buckets where Gen AI helps us in marketing:
✅ Expand your expertise
✅ Jump-start your creativity
✅ Offload your marketing tasks
I’ll illustrate how I’ve used Gen AI in marketing through stories with Google and Synadia.
Gen AI quickly expands our expertise and teaches us new skills
First, let me tell you how Gen AI helped me hit the ground running from Day 1 at Synadia and how it continues to my invaluable sidekick. I created a custom GPT to teach me about Synadia’s product portfolio. I trained it using public documentation. I knew the learning curve on the product built by the world’s brightest distributed systems engineers would be steep. Asking my personal GPT questions promptly got me up to speed.
Here’s another example. Imagine hearing a new acronym during a meeting with your engineers. Instead of interrupting the flow and making everyone wait while someone explains it, my Synadia bot, trained on github.com/synadia-io, immediately clarifies it for me. This way, we can stay focused on discussing our vision for building the ultimate platform for distributed applications without sidetracking the meeting.
My other story happened at Google. You may have seen ‘The Tale of a Model Gardener’ video, a humorous cartoon about Gen AI’s ability to help enterprises achieve their business goals. Gen AI accelerated the creative process for this video we launched ahead of #GoogleCloudNEXT in August 2023. Here’s how.
The idea hit me when cycling between San Francisco’s Marina District and Financial District to Google’s office. I wondered: “How do I explain concepts in AI, such as augmentation and prompt engineering, in fun, approachable ways?” The idea of a cartoon video surfaced but how to start, having never written a video script nor cartoon?
With just 30 minutes until my next meeting, I instructed Bard (now #GoogleGemini). “Hey, Gemini, write me a movie script about X.” I added three sentences with my idea. In minutes, I got a fully developed movie script, beautifully formatted by scenes. I perfected things with small additional prompts. Google #Vertex AI, an end-to-end ML platform, helped me generate images. I stitched together a script draft with some images and sent it to my creative colleagues–all within 30 minutes–and they really liked the idea of a cartoon. Though they had different ideas about what the cartoon ought to explain and how it ought to look; the concept landed from my Gemini experiment.
This triumph really shows what Gen AI brings us as marketers. I got a solid movie script within minutes, with no prior experience in building such things. I didn’t waste the idea, which became an important, valuable deliverable for the company.
Have you seen this fairy tale 🐇🥕🥧 about gen AI?
Gen AI sparks our creativity
I want to expand on how I use Gen AI to jumpstart my creativity, especially when short on time. As you can imagine, only a few weeks into the Synadia role, I’m working on our positioning and messaging. I brainstorm with my small but mighty marketing team, my product and engineering team, and my founder and CEO. I also brainstorm with Gen AI, especially when everyone’s busy. (My bot is always available.)
As the proud granddaughter of a professor of physics and a prolific dressmaker who whipped up gorgeous fashion from his patterns, I’ve long loved prototyping and testing my ideas. My mind works best when reacting to prototypes vs thinking about them. Prior to Gen AI, we had to write or sketch out our prototypes. Gen AI requires a simple prompt for a full document which can spark more ideas and creativity in ourselves and others. (We saw this with my design team at Google and ‘The Tale of a Modern Gardener’ AI-generated cartoon script.) For that same reason product demos are worth 1000 slides. Show, don’t tell.
Have you read our
Gen AI offloads small tasks
Gen AI also can offload small, repetitive, mundane tasks to free us up for more strategic thinking and exciting tasks. At Synadia and Google, Gen AI has helped me:
Jump-start projects. A custom prompt to generate case studies from our many great customer stories captured in blog posts and videos scaled our small team’s output.
Generate images. The early images for my first cartoon script for ‘The Tale of a Model Gardener’, weren’t perfect, but brought the narrative to life.
Edit content and minor things/ideas. While preparing my creative idea for the design team, I lacked the time for editing parallel construction in my lists or capturing typos. My bot took care of that so I could focus on creativity. Writing uses the creative part of our brain; editing uses the analytical. Mixing the two puts the breaks on the creative process so I like to offload the latter to my bot.
Gen AI helps us feel more experimental
Gen AI never lets an idea go to waste. When you’re pressed for time, quickly producing a first prototype helps your colleagues provide feedback faster. While you might discard that initial version, it speeds up the journey to the final product.
If a picture is worth a 1000 words, a prototype is worth a 1000 thoughts
Sometimes, a colleague may take your prototype in a completely new direction. I find this process empowering and encouraging. Each strong reaction, even a negative one, means I’m one step closer to the ideal solution.
Innovation thrives on collaboration and diversity, not egos. Gen AI helps create an environment where ideas evolve and improve through teamwork, making our solutions stronger and more innovative.
The drawbacks and obstacles with Gen AI
Gen AI has some drawbacks. A few I’ve encountered include:
Ubiquitous language. The bar for quality content has never been higher and savvy readers detect and tune out AI-generated if repetitive, generic, and vague. We’ve seen content overload for close to two years now. Cutting through that noise requires high-quality content.
Flawed responses. Use AI responsibly and not verbatim. AI bots are not deterministic. Our bot’s responses may be quick, but sometimes contain significant errors in reasoning. I wrote about this problem in my post on how I turned a daunting 150+ page-long voter pamphlet into a handy cheat sheet for the San Francisco elections. I prompted: “Summarize all the propositions on the March 5th 2024 SF election ballot with their top arguments for and against in a 3-column table using the voter pamphlet as the data source.” The bot’s quick response impressed me. But I found reasoning errors and one argument was entirely made up by the bot. Always check your results.
No slide fixes! Gen AI will not do what we dream of (yet): unify our fonts and texts in our slide decks 😂.
Change in Gen AI is unprecedented. I’ve seen nothing like this growth in my 15+ years in tech. The new features from OpenAI, Google or Anthropic are just the tip of AI innovation. Many startups work towards perfecting Gen AI as well. In the meantime, discovering gen AI feels amazing and I wonder how we lived without it.
Looking ahead
Despite all that Gen AI brings us as marketers, it cannot compete with human storytellers. Gen AI does not substitute well-written, well-narrated customer stories. Even OpenAl looks for interesting use cases of their products exploring new features in unexpected ways. So let’s provide them. A recent LinkedIn post on me using ChatGPT and a Peloton app to rediscover German became one OpenAI reposted, which sparked a wonderful conversation on learning new languages with Gen AI, all from a lighthearted, personal story connecting with technology, efficiency, and learning.
The previous edition of this newsletter reposted by Open AI
This moment reminds me: All Tech brands, even the Silicon Valley hottest companies like OpenAI, seek interesting stories on how we use their products in exciting, unexpected ways to start a community conversation.
For now, Gen AI cannot do that nor can it replace a great writer or story. That’s our opportunity and another way we can best partner with Gen AI as marketers and as storytellers.
➡ How do YOU use Gen AI in Marketing? Share your thoughts in the comments! ✍👇
➡ Need a hand getting started? Shoot me a message! ✍ ✉
I’m a Marketing Executive, an astute influencer, panelist, and public speaker with recent appearances on Harvard Business Review (HBR). I live and work in San Francisco.
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