There’s a lot of founder talk about unicorn hires. 🦄
Even in my life before moving to Silicon Valley, there were high expectations about marketing hires to ‘do it all’ across different industries. The main difference is that founders in Silicon Valley aren’t shy about it, and the expectation is laid out front and center.
As I’m thinking about my next career step, I’ve been proactively piecing together what I’d like in my next role. I’ve read many job descriptions, spoken to many founders and operators, and am meddling with a bunch of things to find my fun!
I’ve been building a clearer picture of what I actually want and what I’m actually good at. The last few months have given me more clarity than ever 🫶
In the midst of all that, I can’t help but think the hiring system and mindset for marketing are very flawed and broken.
Most founders don’t know what they want, and that’s primarily because they’re not sure what their business needs, and each business is unique. They have different products and sales motions, whether it’s for consumers, businesses, or a little bit of both, and in that case, what do you prioritize?
There’s a lot to figure out, all while feeling the urgency to capture the market. The pressure to reach X amount of ARR or to be the first mover in a new category is real, which is why many founders want to work with marketers who have figured it out for other companies before. We should be generous and empathetic about that part.
However, I do not empathize with founders who have unrealistic expectations and haven’t done the work to understand what marketing is and what it can do. The worst part is that they probably couldn’t do it themselves. And I get that founders want to hire someone smarter than them in this thing that they’re not an expert on, that’s not wrong.
But those founders, the founders who can tell you exactly what rare combination of skills they’re looking for and why that combination matters for this stage, this market, this problem, they’re different from the ones who want a wishlist and haven’t done the work of defining what their marketing hire looks like. That’s how expectations built into most marketing roles, especially founding roles, become structurally and so fundamentally disconnected from how marketing actually works.
Having unicorn expectations, especially when you’re not one, is off-putting. A mentor of mine had actually told some of the founders she was hiring for that they’re better off not hiring anyone with that mindset.
It’s not that great hires don’t exist, but you also have to be good at recognizing what that means for you and how you can also empower and retain them, especially if you aren’t as unicorn as they are. There’s a difference between wanting a unicorn because you know what that looks like and just saying it.
Here’s a pattern I’ve noticed: founders mistake moments or wishlists for systems. I’ve read the job descriptions that are out there now, and that’s a wild rabbit hole to go down. I’ve been piecing together my dream job and reading across different job descriptions to mix and match what I liked about each role. There are also many one-person marketing teams, which means….
The expectations of marketers, especially founding marketers, are becoming unrealistic. They see a viral post and a bold OOH campaign, hire for the moment, and then wonder why the system never comes together.
I spoke to a founder who just wanted to go viral, but marketing isn’t just about that. Virality is a bad metric. Content gets made based on what might spread rather than what actually serves the audience. Channels get prioritized by where the big numbers live, not where the customers are.
This is how you start chasing the hit, but none of them are building anything that compounds. This is how companies end up paying $XX,XXX for a brand video to go viral on LinkedIn but gain minimal pipeline. The ratios are off, but hey, it’s a brand play!
The founders who want to go viral aren’t wrong that distribution matters. They’re wrong about what kind of distribution is actually useful, and they’re wrong about whether you can hire your way to it. Virality is not a skill you recruit for. It is an outcome that sometimes follows from good strategy, good timing, and some luck — and cannot be scheduled for Q2.
What you can hire for is someone who understands why things spread, who the audience actually is, and what a brand needs to be legible to the people it’s trying to reach.
Most founders also want someone who has already built an audience, which isn’t a bad ask, but for whom? Existing popular socials and audience from your personal brand or from a company you worked at previously? Those are different things, and when the products are different, that also determines virality, channels, and so many other things.
I spoke to another founder who hired his Head of Marketing because of a billboard campaign she did across Silicon Valley. Yet, he’s disappointed that the marketing hasn’t panned out beyond billboards. He hired for a moment, got confused when the moment didn’t repeat itself infinitely.
She’s actually excellent at exactly the thing she was hired to do. There was just some misalignment about building everything else in the function he was hoping for.
I’ve also interacted with founders who delegate everything without wanting to be fully involved in shaping the vision, and then are unhappy about the result. They wanted a marketer who would “own it fully.” However, if that means making decisions they don’t have to think about and producing results they would have wanted if they had been involved, they’ve just outsourced accountability.
True ownership requires someone to own the vision first. That’s the founder’s job, not the marketer’s. A marketer can build the function, set the strategy, make the calls, but when a founder steps back entirely, they’re not empowering their marketer. They’re setting them up to be blamed for a direction no one agreed on.
Accountability doesn’t transfer down an org chart. It has to exist at the top before it can exist anywhere else.
I would never want to work with the first or third founder. A lot of this is a team sport and building the systems for consistent marketing, not just a one-off. The second founder might still be worth having a conversation with about scope and expectations. I think there was a misalignment there, but the founder I truly want to work with?
There are two founders I’ve enjoyed talking to during my interview process; they’re so rare, but I should include them. There’s light at the end of the tunnel!
They move with great humility and a let’s-figure-this-out-together attitude. No absurd viral or ‘taste’ requirements. No impossible job description. No phantom timeline. Just: here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t, let’s build the rest from what we find out. That’s the right 0→1 attitude, in my opinion, with the right psychological safety.
I would work for these founders tomorrow.
Any founding marketing hire is going to do a lot of navigating, collecting data, and making informed decisions and bets based on that data, not just going viral. How many leads or sign-ups are you actually getting from that? What story are you trying to sell? When we think of marketing as building connection and awareness, that also changes what you hire for vs. what you hire for in lead generation.
Being a founding marketer is hard. You’re building something without a map, rather than executing someone else’s plan, which is why it’s so important to work with a founder who can align your map you’re drafting to their vision.
Many founding marketers’ JDs look a little crazy now… they’re a combination of product marketing manager, content engineer, creative director, video producer, and more, all wrapped in one job… (basically a 5-person team at least or an entire department) and are expected to:
Own all channels and launches end-to-end
Build creative themselves (video, ads, landing pages, organic content).
Run experiments across paid, SEO, lifecycle, partnerships, and community.
Wire up attribution pipelines
Have a strong taste
Have gone viral. Repeatedly.
On top of that, you see things like:
“Your idea of fun is cutting a launch video at midnight… and then arguing with the CEO about the hook”
“We’re inventing the function as we go”
“Be willing to do 996”
“Be AI-native”
“Be strategic”
“Ships frequently”
And some bizarre requirements like:
“You’ve gone viral repeatedly”
“You write exceptionally well”
“You have product taste”
Salary: $100–140k (in SF)🫠
And then the salary? $100–140K. In San Francisco. Where a one-bedroom can cost $3,200/month.
This isn’t a job description. It’s a freaking wishlist in the language of busy people, which isn’t exactly a compliment.
Many founders can’t agree on what their first marketing is either… They think they’re the:
📱 Social media person
💰 Paid ads person
🔍 SEO person
✍️ Copywriter
📧 Email person
🎟️ Events lead
🎨 Brand lead
🤝 Affiliate marketing lead
📢 PR rep
Which is unreasonable and unfair. If you want a ten-person team, you can hire one, or start paying like it, too.
The thing about “doing it all”? It’s not just an unreasonable workload. It’s an unreasonable timeline. The channels that actually build something durable (brand, SEO, positioning, content) do not perform during a 90-day probationary period. They compound. They require patience and consistency, and the kind of institutional trust that lets a marketer make a call without having to defend it in every weekly sync.
When I was asked in an on-site interview what I could demonstrate quickly, I gave an honest answer: some lead attribution setup, a few case studies, and some early content that shows my writing style. Low-hanging fruits. Anything related to branding, SEO, or positioning, I told them, would require more time than the typical trial period allows.
The way founders have structured this role makes it almost impossible to evaluate what matters most. You’ll be able to see output in ninety days, but you won’t necessarily be able to see whether the work is working, even if the work is good. Those are different things. Success doesn’t appear fast enough to be visible against the wrong metrics.
Companies, hiring managers, and HR also become frustrated about getting hundreds (and thousands) of resumes and endless searches. But is that surprising?
When a single posting spans so many disciplines and is usually upfront about finding their mythical unicorn, applicants from each discipline will see something they identify with.
And let’s be real: if someone truly has mastery across all those areas, they’re probably building their thing and choosing opportunities that clearly and respectfully value the role, which includes salary as a reward signal.
Another question founders should ask themselves is whether the role and organization were actually built for a unicorn? Writing a wishlist isn’t the same thing as building a team.
I don’t think this gets talked about enough, but what if there are too many cooks in the kitchen? What happens when everyone you hire is a unicorn? Where do you place them? Especially if not all of them can lead? How do you divide responsibilities? Most importantly, how do you keep them happy and challenged?
Marketers and sales always feel like we’re first on the chopping block. We’ve watched enough cycles to understand that when budgets get cut, marketing headcount goes before engineering headcount. And fair, building the product is important. If there’s no product, what do you go to market with?
However, I think another reason is that when a founder gets nervous about runway, the people whose output is hardest to attribute on a short timeline (brand, content, community, positioning) are the ones who find themselves in a “restructuring conversation.” This is why, when a founder also has unclear expectations, no defined scope, and a 90-day clock ticking on “results,” the math doesn’t look so pretty for GTM folks.
You’re being asked to prove value on a timeline that is incompatible with the work, in a function that will be first to go if the numbers don’t move, against metrics that weren’t agreed on in advance. You’re set up to fail. With that being said, you do need to demonstrate how you’re thinking about a problem and how you can set up a system for long-term success. This is what you should be evaluated against.
Which is exactly why the fourth type of founder matters so much. Not because they’re offering security — no early-stage role, or any role, considering how big tech is shifting, offers security — but because they’re offering clarity. They know what they want, say what they don’t know, and don’t put a countdown clock on function-building that, by its nature, can’t be rushed. They’re creating the conditions in which a marketer can actually think and do the work, rather than spend half their energy managing up and justifying their own existence.
Psychological safety in a marketing role isn’t soft. It’s what allows someone to bet on a channel before the data is conclusive, to push back on a brief that isn’t ready, to say “this campaign needs another two weeks” without fear that the two weeks will be used as evidence they’re not moving fast enough.
Without it, you get the worst version of every marketer: the one who only does what’s safe, only reports what’s good, only proposes what’s already been proven. Defensive marketing. The kind that doesn’t move anything but also doesn’t get anyone fired.
That’s what the unrealistic expectations actually produce, in the end. Not unicorns. Just very tired people trying to make a viral moment happen before their probation ends.
A lot of founders understand marketing as a series of moments… the launch, the viral post, the billboard on 101. Moments are real, but they are a result of systems, and systems are what you’re actually hiring for when you hire a marketer.
If you don’t understand that, you’ll spend time confused when the system doesn’t follow. You’ll write a job description that asks for everything because you haven’t decided what you actually need. And you’ll lose good marketers.
What founders I liked understand is that marketing is a team sport and discovery process before it’s an execution process, and it’s ever-evolving, which is why I don’t think inventing the function is as bad as it sounds. You’ll always have to reinvent it. We’re seeing it firsthand in the AI era.
When you don’t fully know what your channels or positioning should be until you know your customer deeply and have had enough conversations to hear what’s actually landing, there’s a ramp-up time to figure it out. A founder who builds in that discovery time is not being naive. They’re creating a role where a marketer can actually do their best work instead of performing speed in the direction of the wrong goal.
The best marketing relationships I’ve seen between founders and early marketing hires have this in common: the founder brought a strong point of view on 1-3 problems and real humility about the solution and experimentation. That combination — clarity on what, openness on how, and seeing how your hire thinks through a problem — is what actually works.
I don’t say this to be ungenerous toward founders who get it wrong. Building something is hard, and figuring out what marketing should do for your specific company at your specific stage is a genuinely difficult problem. There are also marketers who want a chill job and write 3 content pieces every week and call it a day, so yes, they’re not it. But difficulty and friction are not an excuse to outsource the thinking and hope the hire figures it out.
Decide what you actually need. Scope it honestly. Then create the conditions where someone can build it alongside you.
am i... a marketer? is a newsletter about the weird experience of working in marketing right now. if this resonated, share it with someone who’s in the thick of it.
📚 World Travel: An Irreverent Guide
🤖 Toying with Claude agents (been distracted), Cleanshot X
🌉 Events I’m attending/want to attend next week:
Show & Tell: AI for GTM w Cursor, Vanta, Zapier, Exa, Upside (May 12)
America’s Next Top Model by Vercel (May 13)
If you find this interesting, you can find me on LinkedIn! We don’t have to do that, though. You can also find me on X and Instagram.
🛜 See you on the internet! 🌐
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