How Semrush’s ex-VP of Brand Builds a Founder Brand From Scratch w/ Olga Andrienko (CMO at Foxtery)

Olga Andrienko spent 12 years helping build Semrush from $5M in revenue to IPO. She led social, brand, global marketing, and eventually operations at scale. Now she’s joining a pre-seed startup as CMO to build everything from scratch:

- A new product category (AI-driven corporate learning)

- A founder brand- An employee advocacy system

- A modern AI-powered marketing engine

We discuss:

* Why Olga left Semrush after 12 years

* Why enterprise marketers feel stuck right now and how AI restrictions slow innovation

* What marketers should actually do in a scary job market to stay employable

* The #1 skill marketers need in 2025: experimenting with AI + no-code on their own

* The departments where AI creates the biggest leverage (hint: not marketing)

* How Semrush cut reporting time from 10 hours down to hours using automation

* The automated workflows Semrush shipped: SOV tracking, reporting, content QA

* The dream content engine Olga couldn’t build and why AI quality still isn’t there

* How AI will reshape marketing orgs and which roles will (and won’t) survive

* Why social media managers now have more strategic leverage than ever

* Why brand pages on LinkedIn are basically dead and how to fix it

* How Semrush scaled employee advocacy to 10M+ impressions a year

* Employee advocacy vs executive thought leadership: the real difference

* The exact system Olga is using to build her founder’s brand at Foxtory

* How she scrapes top founders, analyzes formats, and recreates winning post types

* The outbound → founder-brand → content loop that drives traction

* Why a founder brand is a multi-year compounding asset and not a 3-month project

Perfect For You If

* You’re a founder building your personal brand from zero

* You lead marketing inside a startup and need leverage fast

* You work in enterprise and feel slowed down by approvals, rules & legacy systems

* You want to build an employee advocacy program that actually scales

* You want to understand how top marketers think about org design & team structure

* You want a behind-the-scenes look at how a former Semrush exec builds in public

Connect with Olga:

Olga’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olgandrienko/

Foxtery: https://www.foxtery.com/

Connect with me:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Website: https://www.project33.io/

Chapters

00:00 — Why Olga left Semrush after 12 years

02:00 — The gap in her career: building from zero

03:30 — Solo vs team: why she chose a startup

06:00 — How AI restrictions slow down enterprise marketers

08:30 — What marketers should do when the job market feels unsafe

10:50 — The biggest AI opportunities inside large organizations

13:00 — Semrush’s 10h → 2h reporting automation

14:30 — How they automated share-of-voice tracking

16:45 — The content engine Olga couldn’t get approved

20:15 — How AI changes team structure & role definitions

22:00 — Why social media managers now have disproportionate leverage

24:00 — Why most brand pages are a graveyard

27:00 — How Sem rush scaled employee advocacy to 10M+ impressions

30:30 — Advocacy vs executive thought leadership

33:00 — Why Olga never touched executive accounts at Semrush

36:00 — How she’s activating her new founder’s brand at Foxtery

38:30 — Scraping top creators and rebuilding winning formats

44:00 — Why she refuses AI-generated infographics

47:30 — How she’s measuring success before product launch

49:40 — Founder brand as a long-term compounding asset

51:00 — What’s next for Foxtery

#linkedin #founderledmarketing #linkedinads #linkedinagency #founderbranding #saas #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen #content #b2b #revenue #contentmarketing #performancemarketing #videomarketing #personalbranding

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