Taste, storytelling & the modern CMO

Happy Tuesday Brex Community,

A post last week about storytelling went viral and it got me thinking about how much the role of the CMO has changed and why marketing matters more than ever. It’s nearly impossible today to find a CMO who is excellent at every aspect of the role. Not because the talent doesn’t exist but because the scope of the job has exploded.

Modern CMOs sit at the intersection of brand and performance, across an ever expanding set of channels:

Meta, Alphabet, TikTok, Amazon, X, TV, radio, OOH, direct mail, content, newsletters, podcasts, swag, Reddit, LLMs, influencers, PR, IRL events, conferences, launch videos, virtual events, community, and yes, $hitposting. And across all of this, CMOs are expected to layer in subjective skills like taste, storytelling, and cultural judgment, while also being deeply data-driven and willing to take calculated risks. That’s an extremely hard combination to find in one person.

There are still founders who don’t believe marketing is critical. In my experience, this skepticism often comes from engineering-led teams. That’s understandable. When you’re heads down building product, marketing can look “fluffy.” But I’d encourage anyone with that perspective to talk to successful founders and operators about how essential marketing was in turning a great product into a great company.

As you’re building, it’s never too early to think about how people will actually hear about what you’re creating. Talk to specialists across different channels. Understand what your first experiments should be. Learn where your product naturally resonates.

And if you already believe in marketing but aren’t ready to hire a CMO yet, consider starting with specialist consultants rather than making a senior hire out of the gate. This is one of the most dynamic moments marketing has ever seen. Lean into it and surround yourself with the right experts in this dynamic field.

Have a great week, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays,

Shai Goldman

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Meet Martin Gedalin, Founder of Rings AI, a relationship intelligence solution for investing firms, banks, professional services firms and enterprise sales teams. They help teams manage their network at scale, handling everything from relationship analytics to warm intro paths, sourcing and activity capture. They recently came out of Stealth, you can find their launch video here.

Problem

The heartbeat of any investing firm, bank, or professional services firm is its network. New deals are accessed and won through deeply curated relationships. Yet the best tool most teams have is still a digital rolodex: a CRM that stores static contact information while the real meeting, market, and relationship context lives elsewhere. Teams are left searching across email, calendars, LinkedIn, and internal documents to piece things together. Even with large teams and support staff, important context is missed and deals are lost.

Solution

Rings AI helps teams manage their networks at scale through automation and data centralization. Rings brings together market data, email and meeting context, and automated relationship analytics in one place. This allows teams to quickly surface relationship insights, identify warm introduction paths, and work with an AI that understands their actual network and history. Rings can serve as a primary CRM or work alongside an existing CRM to add real relationship intelligence.

Why it matters

When the core of your business is its people, you do not want them wasting time jumping between tools to gather context. You want them focused on building new relationships and strengthening existing ones. Rings AI gives teams back that time, helping them access and win more deals today while continuing to grow their network for the future.

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Brex is the intelligent finance platform built for speed and control. Combining corporate cards, banking, treasury, expense management, bill pay, travel, and accounting, Brex helps companies spend smarter and move faster in 120 countries. By integrating AI across every workflow, Brex enables founders and finance teams to eliminate manual work, do more with less, and accelerate impact. More than 35,000 companies from startups to enterprises run on Brex, including ServiceTitan, Robinhood, DoorDash, Cursor, and Sonos