Why Startup Marketers Should Be Diagnosticians — Advice from OpenAI's and Stripe's First Marketing Hire

At first blush, marketing and medicine don’t have much in common. But Krithika Muthukumar manages to find a similarity between startup marketers and the talents displayed on the medical drama “House.”

“The job of a marketer, especially in the early days of a startup, but on a constant basis, is that of a diagnostician,” says Muthukumar. “And depending on how you answer diagnostic questions, you’ll invest in very different hires, work streams and strategies.”

No two startups are alike, which means there’s no one cure-all for a marketing malady. It takes a shrewd eye to spot hidden opportunities and non-obvious weaknesses — and figure out how to tackle them.

Muthukumar has those instincts herself. Following stints in product marketing at Google and Dropbox, she met Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison back in 2013, when they were still doing marketing themselves. “During my first conversation with John, I told him that they had done all of their websites wrong. So he asked me to critique a recent landing page they'd put up for the first early version of Stripe Connect,” says Muthukumar. It was her unvarnished feedback that ultimately convinced the brothers that they needed a marketer. 

She went on to play a leadership role within the function at Stripe for nearly nine years — where she was the only marketer for the first three — as the company grew from 60 to over 7,000 people. The startup’s whirlwind growth required continuous diagnostic work. “In those early days at Stripe, every day was an exercise in prioritization,” she says. “Do I work on a sales narrative that will be used for the next year by every single salesperson? A blog post that needs to go out the next day? Or ICP and buyer journey research so that we can get more crisp on who we're targeting and why?”

After Stripe, Muthukumar joined Retool as Head of Marketing and Developer Experience, and now, she’s VP of Marketing at OpenAI, where she reprised her role as the first marketing hire to shape strategy for one of the buzziest companies in the world. In each chapter, she’s helmed marketing across dramatically different demand engines, company stages, market segments and products, a testament to her skill for puzzling out all kinds of startup challenges.

In this exclusive interview, she reflects on what’s fueled her success as a repeat founding marketer, offering advice both for making the first hire and for how those in the role can work more effectively with founders. She also walks us through the tenets of how she approaches brand, along with the internal review frameworks she’s leaned on to keep the craft and quality bar high as hypergrowth takes over.

Whether you’re a marketer flirting with the idea of joining an early-stage startup, a founder considering your first hire here, or just curious for a glimpse into the mind behind brands like Stripe and OpenAI, Muthukumar has wisdom in spades.

LOOK FOR THESE ATTRIBUTES OF A GREAT EARLY MARKETER

When Muthukumar first got to Stripe, there were a dizzying number of projects for her to sink her teeth into. “It was a crazy high-velocity place. We were launching things left and right,” she remembers. 

Staring down infinite possibilities and pulling out a list of priorities on a daily basis is a typical undertaking for a startup’s first marketer. Here, she lays out the qualities she’d look for in someone who’s up to the task.

They don’t blindly follow a playbook

The best early marketers don’t just recycle the same formulas that have scored them results in the past, but rather can test new strategies as they tackle unique problems.

“Is this person coming in with a playbook or a set of things that they feel very comfortable doing? Are they suggesting you do something just because of the stage of your company?” says Muthukumar. “Or can they get really customized for your needs? Do they understand what you’re trying to do differently and create marketing strategies that complement that?”

For the first marketer, you don’t just want the playbook. You want someone who is very unique in the same way that your company is unique.

Muthukumar offers an example of how defying the traditional developer marketing “playbook” can be a smart call. “At Retool, we showed up to trade shows where people were in the mindset of curiosity and learning about new vendors. We did two things differently: We didn’t optimize for volume, and we had our product managers and engineers do custom demos, which was a lot of work,” Muthukumar says.

They’re curious about the product

“I’m personally a marketer who can’t market a product I don’t believe in or haven’t used myself,” says Muthukumar.

She finds that fascination in the problem you’re solving coupled with genuine enthusiasm is a motivating force for a founding marketer. “You want someone who has played with your product and gone through the onboarding flow. Are they doing the homework or are they expecting you to pitch them? At some point in the recruiting conversation, they have to show that excitement about the product,” she says.

Muthukumar embodies that product curiosity today at OpenAI, finding creative ways to put ChatGPT to use across her own workflows. “I can honestly say we use ChatGPT on an hourly basis for everything, from strategy memo writing to copywriting to synthesizing data, and I’ve become quite dependent on it,” she says. “In my early weeks at OpenAI, we launched ChatGPT Enterprise, and lead volume went through the roof. So I used ChatGPT to create a Python script that was our first lead scoring module, which we put into production for the sales team.”

They’re T-shaped and (probably) spike in product marketing or demand gen

Before the first marketer can build out a team, they’ll need to do a lot of the nitty-gritty work themselves, from writing blogs to running growth sprints. That’s why Muthukumar recommends a generalist with experience across many sub-disciplines — but likely has deep knowledge in one (the vertical bar of the proverbial “T”).

“In the early days, you want to bring on folks who are well-rounded. They may have a domain area that they’re experts in, but they can flex to other needs,” she says. 

If you bring highly specialized folks into a startup, it often doesn’t work out because your diagnostic may yield a very different result even three months from now than it does today.

As for the depth of experience in that T-shaped marketer, Muthukumar advises most startups to start with someone who has strong chops in either demand generation or product marketing (she was a product marketer herself prior to joining Stripe).

To determine which type of marketer would be most useful, take a pulse check in conversations with prospective customers. 

• If you’re converting most of your prospects, you’ve likely found some nascent product-market fit, but to unlock developing PMF, you need help stirring up more demand. “If you can get people into a room and close them, what you need is more fire at the top of the funnel. You need a demand generation person who can bring more awareness, more leads and more conversations into the funnel,” says Muthukumar.
• If demand is less of a problem, but conversion is hit or miss, you might benefit from hiring a product marketer at first. “If you find that some people really get it and some people really don't, that probably means you need more product marketing help — someone to come in and help articulate that differentiation and positioning to get you much more likely to win those deals, whether it's writing up ROI through case studies or creating more compelling narratives for the pitch,” she says.

They’re not distracted by vanity metrics

“Marketing can get bogged down in vanity metrics. The number of people who engage with a tweet, arrive on a landing page or open an email — those are all bullshit metrics,” she says.  In Muthukumar’s view, these stats can be smoke and mirrors — a diversion from the numbers that can help a marketer diagnose the core business needs. 

“What I've tried to do in the entirety of my career is focus more downstream. When it's in partnership with sales, we actually take a look at revenue that’s influenced. When we work with the product team, we're looking at engagement and usage. The focus was on those bottom-of-funnel metrics, but of course we would still keep an eye on the top-of-funnel numbers,” she says.

INCREASE HIRING ACCURACY FOR YOUR FIRST MARKETER

Many founders can pull from a well of personal experience in areas like product or engineering when screening candidates for those early roles. But marketing is a less common background for founders, which means they’ll often have to scout the first marketer without any firsthand knowledge of the domain.

That doesn’t mean finding the right person has to be a shot in the dark. Muthukumar spells out some common pitfalls in the marketing recruiting process — and what to anchor around instead.

Don’t conflate brand pedigree with impact

It’s easy to assume that a big tech name stamped on a resume is a proof point of a candidate’s abilities. And while in many cases that might be true, it’s crucial to go deep on someone’s individual accomplishments instead of taking an impressive past role at face value.

Sometimes high growth covers all wounds. Did this person actually make an impact, or did a rising tide just lift their boat, too?

She suggests asking candidates these interview questions to parse out whether they personally drove an achievement, or just benefitted from a larger organizational effort: 

• What are the initiatives that you moved ahead?
• What are some work streams that you came up with and executed?
• What failure modes did you face?
• What are the biggest challenges you left undone at your previous company?

Ditch the 30-day strategy exercise

To vet for candidates who, by Muthukumar’s standards, don’t just rely on one played-out playbook, you’ll need to rethink the classic 30-day strategy assignment. “I’m not a big believer in take-home exercises, especially for very senior roles,” says Muthukumar.

Instead, she’d push for a live strategy session. “You want someone who can get very deep on your funnel. So I would usually start by getting together for a workshop and whiteboarding,” she says. “Do they understand the dynamic of your company?”

When she’s hiring for marketers and evaluating how candidates would tackle her company’s funnel, Muthukumar likes to ask herself one question: “Did I learn something from that conversation that’s going to change my thinking about what I'm already trying to move ahead in my company? That's a mark of a great marketer.”

For an early marketer, I would skip the exercises that many founders do, which is usually a 30-, 60- or 90-day strategy plan. Anyone with access to Google can come up with a good document on that front.

HIT THE GROUND RUNNING: A FOUNDING MARKETER’S HOMEWORK FOR THE FIRST MONTH

Once the first marketer opens their laptop on day one, their diagnostic skills are immediately put to the test. To set a clear course of action for those first 30 days, Muthukumar recommends marketers start with these assignments.

Create a “state of the funnel” report

The first task is to run that diagnostic on the company’s funnel. “First, I would learn about the sales or buying motion. Whether it’s product-led and self-serve or sold, understand the dynamics of the funnel really, really deeply,” says Muthukumar. “Sit with the product team, the sales team and the data team, if one exists, or the CTO themselves, to spelunk into the data and put that report together. That really grounds your understanding of the mechanics of the business and where the opportunity areas are.”

Once the marketer has gathered their findings, they can act as an internal spokesperson for the health of the funnel. “After the first month, you should be able to create a ‘state of the funnel’ report that you share with the rest of the leadership team. Include your observations on the biggest drop-offs and opportunities,” she says.

Muthukumar shares how she tackled funnel diagnostics upon arriving at OpenAI, which has a multi-pronged selling motion to consumers, businesses and developers. The task for the marketing team isn’t stoking demand — there’s plenty of that — but rather figuring out how to position the product’s capabilities for each persona.

“We don’t have an awareness problem for OpenAI and ChatGPT. But people don’t know how they should be using it. We need to create that use case epiphany for consumers,” she says. 

Muthukumar finds a similar dynamic in the enterprise space. “Many companies advertise AI as this way to generate crazy images of cats in space — not the durable use cases that impact your day-to-day life. The marketing challenge is showcasing and storytelling some of the really impactful use cases,” she says.

And for developers, the challenge is differentiating the product from compelling competitors. “Developers have a plethora of choices for the infrastructure they use to build their software. So we have to invest in the developer experience. We have to be the easiest and most powerful way to build the applications that they want to build. It's about winning the hearts and minds of developers and earning the right to be the de facto for them,” she says.

At Retool, her diagnostic test yielded a very different result — the team needed to bring in more demand at the top of the funnel. “We had tremendous product-market fit. Huge enterprises were using the product for very deep internal tools. Just not enough people knew about it,” she says. “So we went from one very nascent demand engine, which was paid search and branded keywords, to eight different demand engines, from webinar programs to trade shows to SEO. All of these different engines added up to predictable demand that helped us hit our numbers every single quarter.”

Shadow customer calls

The second item on the first-month to-do list is to get the customer’s voice in your ears. “Really understanding the customer pain points and the use cases directly from the customer's mouth is going to be extremely important to you as a marketer,” says Muthukumar.

But marketers shouldn’t just bug the sales team for a recap of the most common customer talking points — they should actually listen in. Even if it’s not feasible to sit in on live calls, they can listen to recordings. “Nowadays with Gong, it's very easy to be a fly on the wall for any sales conversation,” she says.

Lean into launches over listening tours

The advice for startup marketers just starting out is typically to go on a “listening tour” before getting their hands dirty. But in Muthukumar’s opinion, the best way to learn how a startup operates is to get involved in a launch as early as possible. That’s what she did upon arriving at Stripe and OpenAI — jumping in for the launch of multi-currency support at Stripe and ChatGPT Enterprise at OpenAI.

Marketing leaders often feel that they need to take a step back and listen to the organization before they start contributing. But actually being part of a launch in the first 30 days is a great forcing function to understand the operational dynamics and the who’s who of how things get done.

“How do you actually publish something on the blog? Where do you get the data for the user list and the customers you’re trying to email? Even as a leader, you should get pretty hands on with operating a launch at the company so that you can improve those things and jump in when needed,” she says.

HOW TO MANAGE THE FOUNDER-MARKETER RELATIONSHIP

While Muthukumar’s diagnostic chops may have helped her land a job at Stripe and stand up the function in those frenetic early years, she doesn’t take full credit for establishing how Stripe does marketing, noting that the Collisons laid an incredibly sturdy foundation before she even got started.

“In my conversations with the Stripe founders, even though they’d never done marketing before, they already felt like they were 10 steps ahead of me. They had all of the right instincts. They were thinking about brand from day one,” she remembers. “I knew what I could do is come in to polish and amplify the work that they were doing. But I wasn't going to revolutionize or change the way that Stripe wanted to do marketing.”

Muthukumar acknowledges that founders don’t always take a strong interest in marketing and brand — many are typically keen to delegate this work to the first marketing hire. But if a founder does have strong takes, marketers should nurture those instincts. “If the founder has an opinion and is excited to lean into marketing, that’s a gift. It’s fairly rare for founders to care about the go-to-market and positioning and messaging, she says.

Here’s how Muthukumar has approached working with the marketing-minded founder — and how she’d deal with a more marketing-averse founder.

• For founders who embrace marketing: Illustrate the how. For this type of dynamic, the most helpful thing a marketer can do is act as a concierge who can present tactics for achieving the founders’ vision. “The way that I would engage with the Collisons was about extracting their opinions and providing an a la carte menu of options. I tried to get to the ground truth of what they wanted to do with the brand,” Muthukumar says. “A lot of that work is giving founders the vocabulary and language for the options available. This is helpful because they might have a crisp understanding of how they want the brand to show up, but they might not know tactically how to do that.”
• For founders who aren’t focused on marketing: Articulate the why. If a founder falls into this camp, early marketers will need to take on the advocacy work of communicating the purpose behind the projects they want to pursue. “For the founders who don’t seem to care as much about marketing, it’s a marketer’s job to help them to understand the benefit of it,” Muthukumar says. “You can showcase companies that are doing marketing well and what it takes behind the scenes, along with the investment and commitment it takes from the founders to make that happen.”

GET TO WORK BUILDING A BOTTOMS-UP BRAND

“Brand can be seen as this very top-down umbrella where marketing comes up with the brand positioning and messaging and voice. And then that cascades down into all of the activities that you do,” Muthukumar says.

“But I actually think brand, especially at tech companies, and at high-tech companies targeting developers, is a very bottoms-up motion where you make a million small decisions and be very intentional about them. That adds up to a gestalt of how developers think about you, and then overall how decision-makers think about you.”

Brand isn’t owned by marketing. It’s disingenuous and detrimental to how you think about brand if you think marketing owns it. Brand is a shared cloud between marketing, comms and PR, the founders themselves and the product, which is the first touchpoint into your brand.

Muthukumar shares her favorite bottoms-up principles for defining a brand that she’s picked up from Stripe, Retool and OpenAI.

Develop a razor-sharp POV 

“I’m convinced that every company that wants to be effective at marketing their product has to have a really crisp point of view,” she says.

At OpenAI, that means getting extremely prescriptive about how customers should be using the platform, particularly on the enterprise side.  “We could be saying, ‘Hey, here's this whole box of LEGOs. You can build whatever you want with it.’ That may be true, but what there's really an appetite for in the market is for us to come in and say, ‘Hey, if these four use cases aren’t part of your AI roadmap in the next 12 to 18 months, you're going to be behind your competitors and the market. This is how you should be thinking about the space,’” she says. “That mindset shift is something that any company can do.”

Stay aware of your audience’s BS detector

Muthukumar’s next brand directive is to figure out how your audience talks and wants to be spoken to — along with what will turn them off. That was crucial when marketing to developers at Stripe, an audience that’s especially allergic to marketing-speak.

“How do we show up for the audiences that we really care about? At Stripe, that North Star was developers. If we didn't have the hearts and minds of developers, we were going to lose,” she says.That commitment to the developer spirit manifested itself in every piece of collateral that went out the door. “When we shared our content, it wasn't behind a gated wall where you had to put in your email address. We were very intentional about using plain spoken language that would resonate with developers in every campaign. It wasn't fluffy or over the top,” she says. “It was knowledge sharing just for knowledge's sake. Our engineering blog got a lot of traction because we were taking learnings as developers ourselves and then putting that out there,” says Muthukumar.

Show up consistently across personas and products

“People really undervalue consistency in marketing,” says Muthukumar. “With SaaS companies that have different practitioners and decision-makers, you might think you have to bifurcate how the brand shows up in different channels for different personas. At Stripe, we didn’t, and I think that consistency actually really mattered.”

Muthukumar puts that practice of brand consistency into context with an anecdote. “We put out a primer on machine learning for fraud prevention. You would think the intended audience for that was an engineer or an engineering manager, even a CTO,” she says. “But we had a CFO reach out with great feedback. And that response accelerated a deal where they were the final decision-maker to bring Stripe into their very large enterprise organization.” 

If you think you need a different message for CFOs and a different message for IC engineers, that can actually lead you astray when it comes to brand development.

Of course, there are two opposing schools of thought when it comes to creating multiple brands for multiple products versus one flagship brand for all products. “Whether you're buying an iPhone or an iPad or a Macbook, you associate that with Apple. It's a branded house. On the other side, Meta has Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, and the brand loyalty is with those sub-brands. It’s a house of brands. I don't think you can kind of fall somewhere in between,” she says.

Muthukumar is partial to the “branded house” approach. “You have to pick one or the other. For us at OpenAI, the mission is AGI, and we have different vehicles to help people get that, whether it's developers infusing that technology into their own products or consumers using ChatGPT directly as an app. I think it's really important that OpenAI becomes a branded house rather than a family of brands.”

It’s okay to borrow inspiration — just not from competitors

When it comes to sizing up the competition, Muthukumar shares a different take. “At Stripe, we borrowed ideas from people who were doing things well, but very much from outside of our domain. So we would never try to one up our competitors. We would steal copiously from domains as far ranging as healthcare to people who were launching new programming languages to the security field,” she says.

“For example, we launched a Capture the Flag tournament at Stripe, and that's typically for InfoSec researchers and Black Hat areas of security research. We did that in the payments domain, and we had no expectations of how many developers would participate. But at its peak, we had about 10,000 people go through the entire five different levels of the Capture the Flag challenge,” she says. “Many of the victors went on to become Stripe engineers in the future. So that kind of stuff was really, really interesting to our brand as well.”

If we had copied from our competitors, it would have felt pedestrian — and minimized what otherwise could be possible with the brand.

Overinvest in craft

Muthukumar finds it’s crucial to infuse marketing touchpoints with an element of delight — which can shape how people perceive your product itself.

“Brand is the business value of delight,” says Muthukumar. “When you spend that extra time on craft, you increase the chances of reaching audiences beyond your core ICP.” 

At Stripe, that meant sweating the details, even if that extra effort pushed back project timelines. “We wanted to launch a page that showcased our open-source contributions. But we delayed the launch of that page by almost a month and a half because our design team wanted to implement the Game of Life in the header background of that page. And that sounds crazy.”

But the team’s obsessive commitment to craft paid off. “It went viral, which speaks to the craftsmanship that we place on our product,” she says.

She shares another example of how the marketing team at Retool spent extra time on whimsical details. “We put out these beautiful explainers about the history of Visual Basic and Yahoo! Pipes, which are the spiritual predecessors to Retool. We spent a lot of time coding in some Easter eggs and design elements that then caught the attention of the people who we wanted to be reading the page.”

There’s an attribution that’s imbued into your product by how much time, effort and initiative you place on your marketing.

Just don’t expect immediate returns for an investment in craft in the short term — you’re playing the long game here. “Jaleh at Mutiny has talked a lot about the program-level customer acquisition cost (CAC). It’s really important that you think about blended CAC across your marketing activities, but also at the program level,” Muthukumar says. “You can either amortize that across the rest of your programs or think about it as the program-level return and keep brand separate. Brand is always a bit of a bet, and your founders need to be bought in.”

If you're always looking for the short-term payback from brand, you're not going to get there. But in the long term, it amortizes across all of your programs. It makes them all more effective and pays off in dividends.

… But don’t lose sight of your mission

Muthukumar shares one top-down brand lesson: Keep your company’s mission central in every project — even if it’s produced outside of the marketing department. A thoughtful display of craft still needs to ladder up to the company’s broader mission.

One branding initiative from Stripe that materialized its mission effectively is Stripe Press, an editorial operation that publishes books on technological, economic and scientific advancement. “Stripe Press was an organization outside of marketing when it first started. We incubated it as a program that was mission-driven around Stripe's long-term goals of increasing the GDP of the internet. To realize that, we invested in sharing knowledge and ideas for progress with the world,” says Muthukumar.

If you make brand bets that are too orthogonal to your mission, people can very easily sniff that out. It has to connect back.

STRUCTURING INTERNAL REVIEWS AS YOU SCALE

Muthukumar is an expert in scaling a marketing operation after transitioning from a one-woman team to a manager of many over the course of nine years at Stripe, continuously giving away her Legos.

But Stripe’s bottoms-up brand ethos never wavered as it evolved into a billion-dollar, multinational company. Muthukumar credits that consistency to the organizational reviews put in place by the marketing team — alongside company leadership — to make sure that everything they shipped stayed true to the Stripe brand. 

It was about scaling judgment, however. “I'll be a little contrarian here and say that I don't think we scaled taste at Stripe. Instead, we invested in processes and systems that ensured that everything that went out the door had taste,” she says. “We had eyes reviewing basically every piece of content. If it touched an audience size of more than 100 users, it went through the review process.”

Every email, every blog post, every landing page, every event is a representation of our brand. So the importance of that at Stripe manifested in these review processes.

Internal reviews don’t just help steward a company’s brand — they can help decentralize knowledge. “What I see often happens at scaling startups is that everything is in the head of the founders or the one early marketer who knows everything. And by the time a new person comes in, they don't know how to succeed. Too much of it relies on social capital,” she explains.

Stripe’s review frameworks in turn served as immersive onboarding for new marketing hires. “These systems were designed so that a marketer in their first month at Stripe would know exactly what it took to take something all the way from idea to execution and could follow a series of processes to make sure their work was very effective at the company,” says Muthukumar.

These are the guardrails Stripe set up:

Put marketing in a fishbowl to keep the entire team in the loop

“We had marketing review forums that included not only the team that was working on the project, but John, our co-founder, and marketing leadership," says Muthukumar.

“We also had a shadow Zoom room, like a marketing fishbowl, where the rest of the marketing organization could observe the discussion. That transparency went a long way to help others understand what they should be thinking about when they come to these forums.”

Set 20% and 80% checkpoints

Don’t just check in before a project is almost out the door — reviewers should take a temperature check when there’s still time to change course, if necessary. 

“We would do a 20% strategy review to make sure that we were aligned on the goals and intent of any big project,” says Muthukumar. “Then we would do an 80% review for the execution and check in on how things were going — what each of the channels and collateral looked like. It’s important to check in at the 80% mark, and not the 99% mark, because you still want the ability to make changes.”

The contents of the check-ins would span the gamut. “Sometimes it would be a very quick, ‘This looks good, let's get it out the door’ situation. Sometimes it was about asking, ‘Is this really the right audience? Is this really the right positioning?’” Muthukumar says. “For product goals, we might ask, ‘Is this the right product direction if we're marketing it in this way? Are we constrained to market it in this way? Should we not be making some changes upstream to what we're launching in the first place?’”

Hug the elephant in the room to stay focused

Muthukumar liked a colleague’s twist on the classic idiom as a gentle reminder to keep team members on track. “If anyone was going off on a tangent, one of the things that our COO at the time, Claire Hughes Johnson, would say was that you shouldn’t just point out the elephant in the room — you need to actually hug the elephant,” says Muthukumar.

“If someone was going down a rabbit hole, it was always fine to hug the elephant and say, ‘Hey, I don’t think this is a productive use of this forum. Why don’t we go back to the decisions that need to be made?’”

Reframe micromanagement as user advocacy

Muthukumar repositions the reviewer’s role as an arbiter of user taste here.

I don’t think you can build a good brand without micromanagement. It gets a bad rap for depriving people of independence or autonomy — but it’s about putting your user first.

“There were some people who held the red pen, and as reviewers they were putting on the hat of the user and asking, ‘Hey, if I'm a user who's seeing this piece of collateral for the first time, am I confused? What questions do I have? Is it in line with the Stripe brand in terms of consistency?’” Muthukumar explains. “It was about improving the work rather than questioning the strategy.”

Muthukumar doesn’t see diligent reviews as being at odds with a culture of respect. “It can still be a very kind environment, which is how I would paint Stripe.”

A CLOSING WORD ON MARKETING (AND COMPANY-BUILDING) MOTIVATION

Now at OpenAI, Muthukumar has no plans to coast off of the company’s market leadership position. On that note, she shares a rousing reminder to founders, marketers and anyone building a startup to never get too comfortable — even when you’re ahead.

“One of the operating values at Stripe when I was there was ‘we haven't won yet.’ It was a mentality that was deeply ingrained into the DNA of the company. It meant that even when we were in the leadership position, we never took that for granted,” she says.

“I bring that with me anywhere I go. So even with OpenAI, it's our lead to lose. I make sure that the team is taking 110% at every at-bat that we get.”