Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman
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What is Krithika’s background and why was she hired as the first marketer at OpenAI?
It seems like there's a playbook for everything, there's a framework for everything. But the reality is you have to spend the hours and the time to really understand your customer.
You were the first marketing hire at OpenAI. I believe Chat GPT is the fastest growing product in history. Let me ask you this. A lot of people might be hearing like, Oh, Chat GPT, it's like, why do you need marketing?
Everyone knew of ChatGPT, but when you clicked one Zoom level further, the thing that came up was, I don't know what to use it for. The work of marketing ended up becoming creating this sort of use case epiphany where people could say, I had no idea ChatGPT could do that. A lot of marketing metrics tend to be vanity metrics about the number of clicks that you got, number of views, number of impressions. I think those are all bullshit numbers. What is that experience that you want your customers to come away with when they interact with your brand.
If your advice is don't just copy what other companies do, what should people be doing?
Put together like a four-step process that has served me pretty well. The the first step here is
Today, my guest is Krithika Shankar Raman. Krithika was the first marketing hire and VPR marketing at OpenAI, the first marketing hire at Stripe, where she was the only marketing person for three years. She was also an early marketing leader at Retool and at Dropbox. She also did marketing for Android at Google. Currently, she's executive in residence at Thrive Capital, where she supports their portfolio and founders on all things marketing, and helps hire early marketing leaders for their. Startups. In our conversation, we talk through all of the biggest lessons that she has learned about how to market your product from her time at OpenAI, Stripe, Retool, Dropbox, and other places, including her four-step diagnostic approach to marketing, her anti-playbook playbook, what B2B companies can learn from consumer marketing, career advice for people looking to get into marketing, and also just what people that don't want to get into marketing should know about marketing to be.
Successful. A big thank you to Kevin Garcia and Kelly Sims for suggesting questions and stories to get into. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of world-class products, including Superhuman, Notion, Linear, Perplexity, and Granola, and more. Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring Bring you Krithika Shankar Raman. This episode is brought to you by EPO. EPO is a next generation A B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Epo to power their experiments.
Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Epo helps you increase experimentation velocity. Velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more, with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that. That helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytic cycles.
Epo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A-B testing flywheel. Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Epo at getepo.com/slash Lenny and 10x your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com. dot com slash lenny This episode is brought to you by Airtable Product Central, the unified system that brings your entire product org together in one place.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Krithika’s background and why was she hired as the first marketer at OpenAI?
0:00–10:34
2
How did OpenAI’s marketing turn ChatGPT users from “I don’t know what to use it for” into product evangelists?
10:34–20:03
3
What is the DATE framework and why is “being cheaper” a race‑to‑the‑bottom strategy?
20:03–29:29
4
How did Retool shift from inbound demand to outbound growth engines and what tactics worked?
29:29–39:13
5
What were the biggest marketing lessons learned while building Stripe’s marketing function from scratch?
39:13–48:41
6
Why do consistency, quality, and internal review processes matter more than raw speed?
48:41–57:54
7
What does Krithika do at Thrive Capital and how does she help portfolio founders with marketing?
57:54–1:06:55
8
What practical advice does she give on AI‑driven pricing experiments and using AI tools in marketing?
1:06:55–1:13:58
Speakers
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