Building Founder Brand as a Flywheel

Kacie Jenkins is the new Head of Marketing for Claude Code (she joined a couple weeks after this recording). Before joining Anthropic, she was SVP Marketing at Sendoso, VP Marketing at Sourcegraph, and VP Marketing at Fastly, where she helped take the company from Series A to $200M ARR and an IPO.

In this episode, we talk about how she built executive brand programs before it was a thing, what actually drives pipeline from LinkedIn, and why anything that sounds corporate is dead on arrival.

We discuss:

- Why she felt like she had to perform a “TV version” of an executive when she first got promoted

- How Fastly built their brand around their CEO’s personality and why they let him swear in F1000 meetings

- How to turn LinkedIn DMs into pipeline

- Where ghostwriting works & where it breaks

- Anything that sounds corporate is dead on arrival

- The organic content playbook that made her paid ads perform 50% better

- Why developer marketing starts with credibility

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Connect with Kacie:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaciejenkins/Claude Code (Anthropic): https://www.anthropic.com/

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Connect with me:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/Project 33: https://www.project33.io/

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My personal takeaways:

1. Corporate is dead upon arrival. Anything that sounds or feels corporate, developers will write off immediately

2. The worst thing you can do with a CEO who doesn’t naturally want to do founder brand: try to make them sound more formal or executive-y. Everyone will know because that’s not how they show up in person. At Fastly, their CEO swore all the time. He’d roll into Fortune 1000 meetings and drop an F-bomb when he really meant something. People found it endearing because he was exactly the same in every room.

3. She spent way too long performing a version of herself she thought should be at the table without emotion, very serious, and didn’t ask for help. People told her no one wanted to be around her anymore. What got her there was that she was different than everyone else. She was a writer, a singer, understood how to build communities and scale human connection.

4. Building trust is now more important than it even was 10 years ago. No one will listen to you if they don’t think you’re credible and trustworthy, and they can learn from you. You start with great documentation, technical writing, your subject matter experts sharing in public, and building in public

5. Kacie tracks how many connections each exec has with their ICP in target accounts. She puts it on a dashboard. Most CEOs are competitive and they don’t want to be the lowest on the board in front of the whole company. It had a rising tide effect on all other channels.

6. Her two tools for mining content ideas: Granola to record & transcribe every meeting, then use AI to surface patterns across calls. And a weekly brain dump call: “What pissed you off this week? What do you think needs to change? What are we hearing in customer calls that shouldn’t be happening to them?”

7. Asking for help brings people closer to you. It doesn’t make them think you’re incompetent. Lean into what got you there. You don’t have to have all the answers.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.executivebrand.org