Brand and marketing lessons from working across a portfolio of 500+ startups

In this conversation, Gary Survis, who has a diverse background in marketing and entrepreneurship, shares insights from his role as Operating partner at Insight Partners' Onsite team, the firm’s comprehensive growth engine, where he supports startups in their marketing and growth strategies. He emphasizes the importance of experimentation, creativity, and risk-taking in building game-changing businesses, and highlights the need for structured experimentation in portfolio companies. Survis also discusses the role of leadership in driving meaningful evolution and the challenges and opportunities for adopting AI in organisations. He suggests that AI should be seen as a tool to unlock target market opportunities and emphasizes the importance of data in driving AI-driven insights and actions.

Key Takeaways

- Experimentation, humbleness, creativity, original thinking, visionary, certain level of risk-taking, process-focused, KPI-driven, and strategic are essential qualities for game-changing entrepreneurs.
- A game-changing leader is paranoid enough to driving meaningful progress.
- Leadership plays a crucial role in driving structured experimentation and meaningful evolution to challenge accepted thinking and drive innovation.
- Less over-romanticising what brands are for CEOs and board members. Instead, let’s focus on the business outcome and helping unlock TAM.
- Modern word of mouth is continuously pulling information and listening to your customers, and playing it back to them to create personalised, relevant advertising
- AI is changing marketing, but organizations need to focus on how it can help with workflows in the three key buckets: marketing, customer support/ success, and R&D/ product development. Data is key to unlocking the value of AI and driving better insights and actions.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background
03:13 Insights from Portfolio Companies
06:17 Overcoming the Fear of Experimentation
08:37 The Role of Leadership in Driving Change
12:22 Elevating Startups to Game-Changing Businesses
16:12 Common Leadership Challenges
21:29 Helping CEOs and Board Members Think About Brand
28:47 How to Strategically Infuse AI into Businesses
35:27 The Future of AI and Human Roles

Get in touch with us at hello@studioeverywhere.com to learn how we can help your business.