Mel 🦋

I have a lot of thoughts on the whole “it’s impossible to find someone technical who’s also good at creating content, has taste, and deeply understands the ai ecosystem (twitter)” In no particular order 1. I have seen many companies hire for this role too early. When I interviewed for this vague new media/ devrel/ DevX world before joining Cerebras, many very cool companies reached out but they had no clear product to market and no clear audience. What ends up happening is that there is no clear need or scope and this person is dumped to do everything because they lowkey can do everything. (Be warned) 2. Many of the best folks at this role did not start as GTM folks. The most common profile are folks who are engineers first, generally have CS degrees (although many are now self taught) and naturally found themselves really excited to be educators as well. Key word = educators. I had a CS degree from MIT, decided very early I did not want to be a software engineer because it was too monkey mill, and carved out a hybrid role for myself. 3. When thinking about who is exceptional at this role, it’s important to distinguish the person from the company. For example, if someone is at a top lab, how much of the viewership, followers, etc are from them or just natural company groupies. (This is not to say folks at oai, ant, etc are not extremely talented). 4. So! Now everyone thinks they can now be a creator because how good AI is. One of the main differentiators for engaging content is having a literal human face in your content versus obscene amounts of screen recordings and graphic animations. Thus everyone is trying to hire a face of a company and needs to hire faces of a company. 5. This is just a thought but there are very clearly AI companies built around their founder where the founder is the face and everyone at the company feels like it’s their job to just make the founder more famous. I will not name names. I appreciate smaller companies like @browserbase who seem to amplify the many voices in the company. 6. There are still a ridiculous amount of companies who do not realize the value of investing heavily in these types of folks. Perhaps they are scarred by the lack of impact of enterprise/ old school marketing. But these AI companies, when not doing well, react by firing and downsizing these technical GTM teams (wrong move buddy), you never hear about them again, and they spiral into oblivion. Don’t do this. 7. There are two types of companies who “get it”. The companies who just do, and the companies who have been burned by 5+ years of failing to get the company message out and are finally like oh shit. We need to hire these types of folks and do this type of thing.