How scarce is elite growth and acquisition marketing talent?

Harry Stebbings · Jan 24, 2024

There are very few genuinely good marketers today and the current generation of CMOs is a dearth of talent

8:59 20Sales: How to Scale Into Enterprise Effectively and the Biggest Mistakes Made When Making the Move From PLG to Enterprise, Why Discovery Today is F***** & The Biggest Lessons on How to Do Sales Team Compensation with Sean Murray, CRO @ Greenhouse

Harry Stebbings · May 31, 2024

There are very few true growth professionals in the market

47:16 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Harry Stebbings · Dec 12, 2025

Most CMOs are not very good

57:14 20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

There are very few genuinely good growth leaders

49:49 20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

Fewer than 1% of marketing candidates have the systems-building depth he tests for

59:38 20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

Harry Stebbings · Aug 10, 2022

Companies can't realistically hire the people who are genuinely brilliant at content, because those people are either too expensive or prefer to do their own thing

Someone like Andrew Chen has made millions at Andreessen Horowitz and would never join a content team

29:36 20 Growth: Why You Need a Growth Hire Pre Product-Market-Fit? Why Every Company Will Be a Media Company and How To Do It | Communities; What Really Are They? How To Build Them? What Makes The Best? Why Do Many Not Work? | Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing @

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

There are only around 120-200 people in the US with his level of growth experience, and essentially none of them are hirable by a Series A or Series B company

A third are semi-retired or in VC, a third are locked into great roles at companies like Shopify, and a third do advisory work

Scope: a company at Shopify's scale could hire them

56:47 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

The few genuine growth pros that exist won't come to work for your startup

47:21 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Harry Stebbings · May 31, 2024

Elite growth leaders like Dropbox-caliber operators command roughly a million dollars each and won't join a Series A company in London

47:24 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Harry Stebbings · Jan 19, 2024

Great social media writing is not easily replicable — young hires who 'get social' tend to start writing like a corporate account once they are in the job

He has tried for years to hire great social teams and finds few people can move from 'Happy Earth Day' corporate voice to genuinely creative content

33:36 Authentic social voice is rare and erodes once hired

Micha Kaufman · Jun 9, 2025

Entry-level junior marketers are being replaced by AI faster than junior developers

With AI-written code you still have to open it and understand what's written, and even relatively young developers can do that; marketers have no equivalent irreplaceable check

50:43 Boilerplate social media work is obsolete but nuanced viral voice remains extremely scarce

Logan Bartlett · Aug 29, 2022

B2B marketing is a weak talent pool because the best marketers self-select into consumer and the best B2B people go into sales or product

Consumer has bigger budgets and more creative scope (e.g. Super Bowl ads), and within B2B companies sales and product carry more budget and influence; what's left is people who fell into it, split across brand/PR, product marketing and demand gen so you can only hire one of the three skill sets you need

40:27 Best marketers self select into consumer leaving a weak b2b marketing talent pool

Harry Stebbings · Aug 29, 2022

The genuinely great B2B marketers are brilliant storytellers who end up becoming CEOs, which is another reason the marketing pool is thin

He cites Kip Bodnar at HubSpot as someone he'd fund as a CEO who is instead a CMO

42:07 Great b2b marketers become ceos further thinning the marketing talent pool

Harry Stebbings · Feb 15, 2023

Media businesses now need platform-specific leaders (head of YouTube, Instagram, TikTok), and hiring them is hard because these are new disciplines and the best practitioners run their own channels

If you're really good at them, you have your own channel instead

19:13 Platform specific channel leadership talent is scarce because top practitioners run their own channels instead of joining companies

Ryan Petersen · Jun 20, 2026

B2B enterprise marketing is exceptionally hard to hire for because the moment a tactic works competitors copy it, so success requires constant creativity and originality

Anything that works gets copied, so only originality differentiates; and truly creative storytellers tend to become founders themselves rather than take marketing roles

40:30 Creative originality is the scarce b2b marketing trait

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026 · speculative

Elite growth and acquisition marketers are unicorns worth paying up for, and marketing acquisition talent may see the same compensation frenzy over the next year that ML researchers have seen

In each lane there are rare individuals who are 10x others, and companies already pay millions for an ML researcher who can move a model forward

64:01 Elite acquisition marketers command ml researcher pay