The sun never came out the morning I got my dream job. I'd done my final-round Apple interview at 7 a.m. and knew it had gone well. I was just beginning to come down from the adrenaline high, so it took me a few minutes to notice the sky was still completely dark.
By noon, wildfire smoke would choke out the sun and turn the Bay Area sky an otherworldly orange. I almost didn't hear my phone ring with the good news from Apple because the birds outside my window were going berserk. They couldn't tell if it was day or night.
Inside, I also felt completely mixed up. I couldn't articulate why I was about to turn down my dream job at Apple for a thirty-person compliance startup whose website only had a purple llama and a "request a demo" button.
I was about to hit seven years at Google and was itching for something new. When Apple reached out, I knew that if I could get an offer, I would take it. But those hazy pandemic days left me with time to kill, so I also took interviews with a few startups — mostly to get a competing offer for negotiation, but also because I wasn’t into baking sourdough.
One startup was Vanta, an under-the-radar seed-stage company. I knew nothing about compliance. I went into the interview process with low expectations and skeptical about my fit with an early-stage startup.
It was the Vanta team who won me over. Everyone was both kind and killer, especially Christina, the co-founder and CEO. Other founders I'd met that summer all named the same two examples of excellent marketing — Nike and Apple (man, I really wanted that Apple job). Christina reached for The New Yorker, for fashion brand Loewe, and for a British woodstain company whose slogan she admired so much that it later became one of our values ("does exactly what it says on the tin"). Her through line was an appreciation for heritage, craft, and — underneath it all — a sense of humor. Conversations with Christina were the most interesting I’d had in months. She had real instincts and appreciation for marketing, as opposed to viewing the function as something to outsource and model after the “textbook” examples.
So after a surprisingly rigorous interview process for such a small company, I joined as the first product marketer. I learned on my first day that the whole marketing team would report to me, which has set the tone for the past six years. My role has expanded, contracted, split, and reset more times than I can count — back to PMM, then Head of Product Marketing, then adding in Comms and Brand, serving as interim CMO, moving into VP of Revenue Marketing, and now taking on the mantle of CMO at a $4.15B company with 16,000 customers. My six years here have been the most rewarding years of my career.
I think Christina hired me despite my ignorance about compliance because she firmly believes anyone can do anything if they read 10 books about the subject. She’s a self-taught coder, she speaks six languages, and she keeps a running list of the nearly 1,000 books she’s read over the last two decades. Vanta itself is proof of that mindset: She’s become a sought-after expert on SOC 2, a compliance framework she first learned about through extensive customer discovery with security teams.
Any voracious reader of fiction will tell you that the characters worth rooting for are never perfect, and rarely do the most well-prepared receive the call to adventure. At Vanta, the talent culture is shaped by the belief that a person’s arc is far more important than the set point of her resume. You’re encouraged to learn how to do things you've never done before, you're given the grace to make mistakes (and the trust that you won't make the same mistake a second time), and there's always room for your role to shapeshift as the company grows. In my six years here, I've reinvented myself more times than I can count. I wanted to learn new things, and Vanta required me to.
Why I said yes to Vanta
I’m drawn to marketing because it feels like the center of a Venn diagram of my parents’ brains. My dad was an entertainment lawyer for 41 years, an even-keeled business type, but with a zany sense of humor. My mom is a screenwriter — a storyteller who thinks in pictures. Like her, I loved writing from a young age, and her voice always rings in my head when I write, reminding me that writing falls flat when you can’t hear it and see it in your mind.
None of my first few jobs had quite the right balance of creative and business I wanted. I graduated from Stanford at the tail end of the Great Recession, so I chose the stable path: management consulting. It put the analytical side of my brain to use, but gave me few opportunities for creativity. I tried tech writing, which was fun, but I missed the business side. I joined a startup doing a bit of everything for a while, but the startup wound down.
One of my friends was a product marketer at Google, who told me I would love it, so she referred me to their Associate PMM program. I initially balked at the suggestion: It was primarily a new grad program, and I had three whole years (!) of work experience. Taking it meant stepping down to get in the door.
But at the end of my first day at Google, I thought: “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
It was an early lesson that the best careers aren't ladders, they're jungle gyms — you move up, but also sideways, and sometimes down. Over six years, I was able to move all around the Google gym. My first role at Google was on Account Settings — specifically, helping people understand their privacy and security controls in words they'd actually recognize. I loved speaking with people of all backgrounds, conducting focus groups across the US and Europe, which gave me a true appreciation for the sheer scale of technology’s reach and how much impact depended on users’ trust. We launched a Privacy Checkup that explained users' choices in plain English; by 2020, 200 million people were using it each year. I got promoted and moved up and across to Next Billion Users, building for mobile-first economies like India and Indonesia, then over to the Platforms team on Android and Google Play.
Eventually, I’d learned the Google way, and I could feel my learning curve flattening. When Apple called, it felt like the obvious next move: up, and onto the most admired ladder in tech. What I hadn't figured out yet was that I'd have the most fun — and learn the most — by chasing the most interesting move, not the highest jump.
I was connected to Vanta through my friend Dasha, who knew our first Head of People. Much like my friend Caroline who connected me to Google, it seemed she knew something about me that I didn’t. The early conversations started with curiosity (why the llama?) but got more serious simply because they kept scheduling more of them. I remember thinking, “This is a 30-person company. Why am I talking to so many people?” I was used to the rigor of big-tech interview processes: weeks-long, ten different interviewers, take-homes that consumed entire weekends. I expected startup hiring to be quick and easy in comparison. Not at Vanta. I talked to pretty much all 30 people at the company.
I was impressed with the thoughtfulness each interviewer brought to the conversation, and intrigued by the amount of time the team was willing to spend to find the right candidate for an early, but relatively junior, role. After an hour-long “final” presentation for Christina, I learned there was yet one more stage: what we call the values interview.
Christina conducted the interview, asking questions that assessed my alignment with Vanta’s values. She asked my now favorite interview question, which is aimed at assessing our value centered on “frameworks thinking.”“Let’s say I have two projects for you: Project A and Project B. I can’t tell you any details about these projects, but I can answer questions about them. What questions would you ask me to decide which project to work on?”
I’ve asked this question in countless Vanta interviews over the years, and I’ve found it has high signal for people who succeed at Vanta: those who are curious, methodical, and able to unstick themselves in periods of ambiguity. People who can open their laptops to any number of competing priorities on any given morning and figure out who and what to ask in order to get to “right, I’ll work on Project A.”
A few days after the world turned orange, Vanta made me an offer. Eric Martin, aka Emart, the legendary Vanta “sales guy,” did my closing call, and I expected a hard sell. Instead he told me, “Wow, I heard you got an offer from Apple. That’s amazing.” I probably showed my bewilderment on camera. But I realized this was true to the culture — everyone is genuinely rooting for the best for everyone, whether that leads them to Vanta or not.
Then he segued into all the reasons he thought Vanta would be bigger than Apple, and I could tell he believed them. By the time we hung up, I half-believed them too. At Google I'd seen how much software quietly depends on trust. What Vanta had figured out was the business logic underneath it — that trust isn't just what keeps customers, it's what wins them, and a company that makes itself easier to trust grows faster than one that doesn't.
Personally, I also felt ready to take a leap. In the preceding two years, I’d gotten married, lost my dad, and moved across the country and back, landing in San Francisco just in time for the world to shut down with the pandemic. Joining Apple would have meant stability during a tumultuous season, but also being a cog in the machine hoping to make the overall marketing a tenth of a percent better. Vanta felt like a club of people I desperately wanted to join, where my impact would be uncapped, dependent only on me.
I realized the opportunity to help build what could become the next Apple was more compelling to me than making Apple’s marketing 0.1% better.
The freedom to make mistakes (but only once)
I knew Vanta would be a change from Google, but nothing could prepare me for how much. I spent almost every day of my first few months at Vanta absolutely terrified.
I had to quickly learn just about everything: the product, the customers, the business model, the operating pace. The stakes of my learning curve were high because the opportunity ahead of us was massive. When I joined, demo requests were flooding in, but no one knew where they were coming from. We had no formal sales or marketing in place, and we weren’t even running any ads or paid search. The website looked like the landing page of a secret society.
Everyone at Vanta felt the intensity of the demand and how fast we needed to move. At Google, Fridays had been for email catchup and social 1:1s. At Vanta, every Friday at 8:30 AM, we had a ritual called “coffee and compliance” where an auditor or compliance officer would run a training session. At any time, you could be cold-called to rattle off the five Trust Services Criteria of a SOC 2 or the observation window for a SOC 2 Type I (Trick question! It’s point-in-time.)
My first order of business was to figure out how folks were finding out about Vanta, so I talked to a lot of early customers. Almost all heard about us through word of mouth. This mirrored something I observed during my interview process. Whenever I described what Vanta did to a friend, they would invariably ask, “What’s that name again? Fanta? I need that.”
The central marketing challenge at that time was that our customers — startups who needed to prove their security standards so they could land enterprise customers — only learned what SOC 2 was after frantically Googling it when a prospect asked if they had it. We were able to capture a lot of that existing demand by targeting search keywords like “soc 2,” but we knew education could create even more demand. Customers were problem-aware, but not solution-aware, so we invested a lot of our early marketing resources into educating the VC and accelerator ecosystem about why they needed a SOC 2.
By early 2021, we were gearing up to announce our Series A, our first institutional funding round. Most companies at the time were raising Series A at $1M ARR, but we had already blown past $10M ARR. Without a major funding round, people thought we were smaller than we were, which was holding us back from attracting great talent and winning the trust of bigger customers.
I was in charge of our fundraise announcement, which I had never done before. I had never even done any type of comms. This was a big moment for us: The business was ripping, we’d gotten a $50M check, the round was led by Sequoia, and we were going to talk about ourselves publicly for the first time.
I fucked up. I didn’t know what an embargo was — the mutual agreement between a reporter and a PR person that neither will share the news until the designated article’s go-live time. So when the reporters’ article didn’t go live exactly at 6 a.m. PT as planned, I pushed all our materials anyway. The reporter was very unhappy, and called Christina directly.
I thought I’d get fired. All morning, I waited for the axe to fall, but it never did. Christina smoothed it out with the reporter. The article was great, and meetings started pouring in. The next day, I sheepishly attended a warts-and-all debrief with the team. Christina took my side in that discussion and assured me that “Now we know what an embargo is. It won’t happen again!”
It didn’t. I realized quickly that Vanta was a place where it was okay to make mistakes, so long as you diagnose why they happened and apply that learning moving forward. This was jarring to me at first, because corporate life had wired me to fear missteps. But I quickly learned that too much fear can be paralyzing and prevents you from learning.
Christina wants you to make new mistakes. If I made the same mistake again, I would have been out.
Shortly after that, I created two sticky notes in the notes app of my phone: “3 Vanta things,” where I have three things I’m excited to be working on (if the list runs dry, I’ll know something’s wrong) and “Vanta lessons learned” where, as the title suggests, I bullet out lessons I’ve learned from Vanta, usually the hard way, by making a mistake.
There was the time I showed up for a Strategic Initiative review unprepared, and totally whiffed when questions were directed my way (lesson learned: Read the pre-read!). Or the time I was overly defensive about my team’s performance in a 1:1 with Christina which triggered a thoughtful note from her that I was coming across as not self-aware (the exact word she used was “nihilistic”) about what was and wasn’t out of my control (lesson learned: Taking feedback well is a skill. Cultivate it!).
Reading each one of those bullets still stings a bit, like thinking about the most embarrassing things you did in middle school, but the list itself is a comfort to me.
The billboard: Vanta’s breakout, my breakout
It turns out marketing an “unsexy” product is really fun, and Vanta trusted me to take creative bets you wouldn’t expect from a B2B compliance company.
Up until our Series A announcement, my marketing work had been fairly conventional: setting up paid search, doing community education for startups. That fall, we were getting ready for SaaStr, our first-ever in-person conference, held at the San Mateo Fairground, which felt like an opportunity to take a big marketing swing. Delaney, Vanta’s first marketer and my demand gen counterpart, rented a billboard right off of the Fairground exit for two weeks, and we had a week to submit our creative.
We started riffing on what we wanted to say. At the end of a group brainstorm session, we still hadn’t landed on any winners, and the perfect pun popped into my head: “Compliance that doesn’t SOC 2 much.” It felt like spot-on positioning, because Vanta was the definition of a painkiller product. We come in when a startup is about to land a massive customer that could be an inflection point for their company, but the deal gets stuck at the one-yard line because they don’t have a SOC 2. I shared it in the Zoom chat and everyone laughed, but the consensus was that it was good but too provocative, and B2B marketing should be respectable.
But it stuck in my head. Later that night, I ran it by my husband. He thought it was hilarious, which gave me more confidence to fight for it. I shared it with one of our new execs, who felt like one of the first adults in the room, but she didn’t love it, because it implies that compliance inherently sucks.
I still had a gut feeling that it would be good, so I brought it to Christina directly. “It’s a little out of the box,” I remember Christina telling me, “but let me think about it.” I’d told her on a Friday, and then on Saturday morning, she Slacked me, “Okay, it’s funny. Let’s run it.”
So we went with it. Christina posted it, it went viral, and for the first time people knew Vanta’s name as a brand, not just the provider of SOC 2s. We had one of the smallest booths at the conference, but it was mobbed all day by people who saw the billboard on their way in.
It felt like our marketing had kicked into gear after slowly building momentum — we’d just raised this huge Series A after never doing press or marketing, and now we had a viral billboard. Not long before, the embargo mess had me convinced I was the wrong person for the job. I was sure that someone was about to notice I had no idea what I was doing. But the billboard proved otherwise. I didn’t know all the conventional diction of B2B marketing, but I had come to know our product and customers deeply. And I felt more and more confident that I could combine that with the love of storytelling I inherited from my mom to create new diction, with a differentiated tone.
The billboard paid back its rent, and then some. A CTO was driving down 101 and saw it, laughed to himself, and a few weeks later Googled Vanta and set up a demo. Weeks later he became our largest enterprise customer.
It took me a while to name the playbook we were writing. During our first rebrand, the agency ran one of those voice exercises where you pick the words that describe you — was our celebrity doppelganger Tom Hanks or David Attenborough? Was our brand voice witty or warm or bold? None of the words they picked quite fit. “Witty” made it sound like we were straining for a laugh, which was the opposite of what the billboard had done. Half offhand, I said it felt more like we did marketing with a wink. That one stuck. Someone later described the wink to me as the twist in a martini — something a bit unexpected that helps the substance (in our case, dense security and compliance content) go down easy.
Once we named it, we could do it on purpose. We delighted customers by sending them purple socks adorned with “SOC 1” and “SOC 2” after their audit. We hosted our inaugural user conference, VantaCon, the week before SantaCon in San Francisco. We created our own energy drink, ROC 2, for engineers who wanted to stay in flow instead of pull evidence for compliance requirements.
My six-month reinvention cycle
Reinventing myself at Vanta has paralleled how the business has continuously reinvented itself. A sampling of those reinventions:
When I first joined, Vanta was the only player in our space. Then 2021 arrived — peak pandemic, peak ZIRP, peak startups — and overnight we had a few dozen VC-backed competitors all claiming to be "just like Vanta." (On the bright side, it meant all the market education I did in my first year had worked.) The humility and earnestness that had served us suddenly felt like liabilities. I had to amp up my competitive instinct and figure out how to defend a category I'd helped build, this time without Google's name behind me.
Vanta was changing in parallel, standing up a real sales team to match the growth. Stevie Case joined as our CRO — with an unmatched competitive streak and a love of winning, fitting for the first woman to go pro as a competitive gamer — and taught me that the sales team is the largest marketing surface we have. Knowing we had the best product wasn't worth much if a rep couldn't say why out loud, so I became the product's most fluent power user and its loudest advocate with sales.
Going from a product to a platform was the next reinvention. I got to name my first category, Trust Management, and learn how to build equity in that term to make the case that the whole was worth more than the sum of its parts.
More recently, AI exploded onto the scene. Once again, the narrative changed, and Vanta, along with any company founded before 2025, was being called the dreaded “i” word: incumbent. My job was to turn that around — to make our track record and our pace of shipping read as strengths rather than baggage, at a moment when the market was rewarding a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach to AI. When serious allegations against a competitor went viral, our trusted reputation and track record became even more valuable assets.
By 2025, Vanta’s marketing was reinventing itself for a new audience, the enterprise, and I worried about whether we’d be able to keep our wink while talking to bigger buyers. When our first CMO, Scott Holden, joined, our first 1:1 focused on the great many things we needed to do to mature our marketing rigor and polish to reach Vanta’s next stage of growth. I agreed with all of his plans, but made one request: “You can’t kill the llama,” I said, “that’s all I ask.”
It turns out I needn’t have worried. By this time, VantaCon had grown into one of the largest dedicated conferences for GRC professionals. One of the recurring highlights of VantaCon is getting our enterprise Customer Advisory Board, a collection of CISOs, together to get their advice. At VantaCon 2025 we pitched them three concepts for our first large-scale brand campaign, our first campaign targeting CISOs. The feedback was clear: Don’t lose the wink, and don’t lose the llama. Later that night, we took a group of them to a Warriors game, where they met the wink in the wild — Vanta-branded baskets at the security line for phones and keys, stamped "Secure the win with Vanta."
We had always marketed business software with the radical idea that our buyers were actually human. And it turned out that CISOs are human! So we hired Mary Ellen Matthews, SNL's longtime portrait photographer, to shoot our "Calm-pliance" campaign, which has run all around the world. And we redesigned our beloved llama, Ilma, to give her a more polished look and personality.
Just recently, we unveiled Ilma on our new permanent billboard on 101. Once again, we debated taglines to use. After much debate, we went back to the line that started it all: "Compliance that doesn't SOC 2 much.”
Every one of those eras demanded a different focus, a different skill set, a different posture — but all of them still lived inside PMM and Brand, the part of marketing I already called home.
At the end of last year, Scott and Christina came to me with yet another new challenge: leading Revenue Marketing, the third leg of marketing I'd never touched, and the part where AI is reshaping the work fastest.
The Silicon Valley playbook is clear about what you do after half a decade, a 40X run, and a new CMO: You go find your next thing somewhere else. Plenty of CMOs I admire have "only" led PMM before getting the job — one leg of the marketing stool — and I'd already led two. I took the sideways move across the jungle gym instead, because it was the job with the most left to learn.
Very quickly I was confronted with the exact thing Christina had once asked me about in that values interview — Project A and Project B, no context, figure out which to work on. Revenue Marketing threw a dozen of those at me at once (Brand or performance? Upmarket or startups?), but Vanta had trained me for precisely that: to walk into ambiguity, figure out what to ask and of whom, and get to "right, I'll start here." I made an impact fast, and earned the trust of the business.
What I didn't plan for was how quickly the next reinvention would arrive. Recently, Scott decided to move on from Vanta, and the CMO seat opened up. By then I'd led every marketing function at Vanta — I'd started most of those teams, and had a hand in hiring most of the people on them. I knew this business, these customers, and this team in the way you only can by staying inside them for years. Christina set a 1:1 with me and asked me to take on the role. I sat for a moment in shock. Becoming CMO at Vanta, the company I already knew so well, whose marketing DNA felt like an extension of my own, had felt like my dream role since I had turned down my “dream role” at Apple six years before. But I was also extremely happy in my new Revenue Marketing capacity, driving improvements to pipegen and spending a lot of my time building in Claude Code. Before my brain had a chance to catch up, I’d already accepted the role, and with it, my biggest reinvention yet.
While it felt like a big leap, this reinvention only exists because of all the smaller ones. Each time I'd remade myself and it worked, I'd banked a little more of the company's trust, and that trust is what bought me the next, larger reinvention.
Trust compounds, but only if you stay put long enough to let it.
The man who stayed
My dad made the same commute to the same office for the same job for 41 years. Growing up, his career seemed to me like the opposite of reinvention. Younger lawyers at his firm called him “The Professor.” But when he died, my inbox filled with notes from people I'd never met, telling stories I'd never heard. He had helped invent new ways of financing movies — cross-border deals and first-of-their-kind structures that hadn't existed before he built them. And he had changed the course of a younger generation of lawyers' careers, quietly, over years, in a way only someone who'd stayed long enough to have that kind of context and standing ever could. He'd been reinventing himself the whole time, though I'd only ever seen the man who stayed.
What I understand now is what he already knew: You don't have to leave to reinvent yourself. You just have to keep learning, and keep doing the work differently than you did it before. Six years at Vanta, and I'm just getting started.