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Sheila Vashee(CMO of @Figma) joins GTMnow to share how she thinks about brand building across every stage. From selling brownies at age eight, to second marketing hire at Dropbox scaling to $1B+ in annualized revenue, to now leading marketing at one of the most beloved software brands in the world, Sheila has seen it all.
In this conversation, you’ll learn what brand actually means (hint: it’s not your logo), how PLG companies make the leap to enterprise, why being obsessively close to your customers is a compounding advantage, and how AI is reshaping the marketing playbook without replacing the human craft that sets great brands apart.
Discussed in this episode
- Why brand is the sum total of every experience (not just pretty visuals)
- What being the second marketing hire at Dropbox through $1B+ in revenue taught her about early-stage strategy
- How Dropbox’s Space Race campaign blended marketing into company strategy
- The PLG-to-enterprise equation: what Figma did early that Dropbox waited too long on
- Why building the enterprise team early is both an operational and an optical investment
- How Figma ingests customer feedback at scale using quantitative tools + live user research
- The role of AI at Figma: enabling human creativity, not replacing it
- What the shift from SEO to GEO means for marketing teams
- Why social and third-party validation are back as core growth levers
- How consumer marketing experience shaped her approach to measuring brand ROI
- The mentors that shaped her career and the question that changed her trajectory
- Her one piece of advice for anyone building a brand right now: “make good $h!t”
Episode highlights
00:00 – The brownie stand: why brand building started at age eight
03:55 – How Sheila defines brand: it’s what people say when you’re not in the room
05:08 – Joining Dropbox as the second marketing hire
06:07 – Space Race: the campaign that defined Dropbox’s early strategy
06:56 – What consumer marketing taught her about driving revenue
08:29 – Measuring brand ROI through match market testing
09:15 – How Figma thinks about brand building at a macro level
11:21 – The PLG-to-enterprise equation: what Figma did early that Dropbox waited too long on
15:02 – Why building the enterprise team is both operational and optical
17:12 – How Figma ingests customer feedback at scale
18:26 – AI at Figma: enabling human creativity, not replacing it
21:13 – What the venture side taught her about staying sharp as an operator
22:33 – Why the shift from SEO to GEO is inevitable and what to do about it
23:24 – Why Reddit is back and social is a core growth lever
24:51 – The mentors that changed her trajectory
28:59 – One piece of advice: make good $h!t
Key takeaways
1. Brand is the sum total of every experience (not a logo or a campaign).
It’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room. It’s how your support team talks to customers, how your salespeople engage buyers, and the experience your product delivers. Every person at the company is a node of brand.
2. The PLG-to-enterprise leap requires an intentional, early investment.
Figma built an enterprise team far earlier than most PLG companies do and it paid off. It’s the reason 95% of the Fortune 500 now uses Figma. But optics matter more than you’d think: enterprise customers need to see you’re invested in their success before they’ll bet on you.
3. Customer obsession is the new operating model.
Figma’s founders flew to Nigeria to meet early users. Their product support team feeds insights directly back to product. They have 200+ Friends of Figma chapters running worldwide. And their user research sessions are open for anyone at the company to watch live. That closeness to the customer is embedded in the Figma DNA, and it shows up in the product.
4. Measuring brand impact requires creativity.
Sheila ran match market tests at a previous company by fully treating one city with TV, billboards, and brand spend while keeping comparable cities at steady state. The ROI was clear. For brand skeptics who say you can’t quantify it: design the experiment, isolate the variable, and let the data speak.
5. AI enables human creativity. Human taste will always win.
Figma sees AI as a massive enabler. Tools like Figma Make let you generate 20 prototypes in 20 different directions. But the judgment on which path to take, the craft that brings it to life, that’s still human. Sheila’s push to the marketing community: don’t fall into the AI slop trap. MAKE GOOD $h!t!
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Follow Sheila Vashee
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheilavashee
- Figma’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/figma
- Figma website: https://www.figma.com
Follow Sophie Buonassisi (Host)
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
- Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com
Where to Find GTMnow
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- Podcast Directory: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast
GTM 181 Episode Transcript
00:00
Sophie Buonassisi: In the age of AI, content has never been easier to build. Iconic brands, though, never been harder to build. You’ve actually scaled and been at the marketing helm of some of the most iconic software brands in the world. If you could define brand, how would you define it?
00:14
Sheila Vashee: It’s what people say about you when you’re not there. It’s the sum total of all of the experiences that people have with your product and your company.
00:21
Sophie Buonassisi: Sheila Vashi is now CMO at Figma. But the playbook was forged long before in the early days of SaaS. You joined Dropbox as their second marketing hire. What were some of your biggest lessons learned on brand building?
00:33
Sheila Vashee: Early stage marketing as early stage strategy? I literally did everything.
00:37
Sophie Buonassisi: Now AI is reshaping how brands are built and how easily they blend together. How are you thinking about AI at Figma?
00:43
Sheila Vashee: There’s such a temptation to leverage AI to do a lot of the work that will, I think, perpetuate this problem of AI swap.
00:53
Sophie Buonassisi: If you could give anyone building a brand just one piece of advice make.
00:57
Sheila Vashee: Good, make it authentic has to have your touch. That human craft is what is going to set you apart to.
01:05
Sophie Buonassisi: Take inspiration from your early route. I’ve got something.
01:08
Sheila Vashee: Oh my gosh.
01:10
Sophie Buonassisi: Oh my gosh, you’re so thoughtful.
01:13
Sheila Vashee: This is my.
01:13
Sophie Buonassisi: Favorite day to this day.
01:26
Sophie Buonassisi: Sheila, welcome to GTM now.
01:28
Sheila Vashee: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so thrilled to be here.
01:30
Sophie Buonassisi: It is great to have you here. And what I’d love to do today is a little bit unique, because you’ve actually scaled and been at the marketing helm of some of the most iconic software brands in the world. So I’d love to drop you into select moments throughout your life and career and really extract some of the biggest learnings and advice on brand building.
01:50
Sophie Buonassisi: If that sounds good.
01:51
Sheila Vashee: That sounds amazing.
01:52
Sophie Buonassisi: Perfect. Well, I see life because it really did start before your traditional career, because I heard that when you were eight, you actually started a brownie stand. But instead of just selling brownies, you had custom stickers in a box and other kind of areas of the brand. So why at age eight was just not selling a good product or a brownie in your case, enough.
02:15
Sheila Vashee: First of all, I love this question and it is really taking me back. But in some ways it goes back to the old adage of like the a good enough product will sell itself, which has been thrown around for decades and has never really been true. Right. Yeah, I think we all know this, and I think what I was probably getting at back then was the essence of good marketing, right?
02:38
Sheila Vashee: Because marketing extends beyond the product to the entire experience, to how people engage with your brand, what you’re selling, even you as a person. And I knew back then, you know, hundreds of kids in my neighborhood that were selling brownies, all of them wanted probably, or many of them wanted to buy the Barbie house, the three story Barbie house, like I did.
03:01
Sheila Vashee: But and they all probably had better brownies than I did, but only one of us bought that house, and that was because I thought about the end to end experience of that brownie selling. And so yeah, it’s actually like a good lesson for marketing in general, is that you have to think about the whole experience and all the touch points, and people have to care about what you’re doing.
03:19
Sophie Buonassisi: That sounds like an incredible neighborhood just hopping around blocks, selling brownies.
03:23
Sheila Vashee: There’s a lot of brownies in my neighborhood.
03:24
Sophie Buonassisi: Oh, that is that is fantastic. That’s super cool. And you probably did it almost intuitively too, I would imagine. Think about.
03:30
Sheila Vashee: I’ve always loved brands and I’ve always loved brand building. I think even at such an early age, I was able to, you know, understand how companies and brands made me feel. And so I was kind of trying to replicate that with my own little business and make people care about an eight year old who had Barbie dreams.
03:49
Sophie Buonassisi: And you hit on a really important part there. So there’s the feel. If you could define brand, how would you define it?
03:55
Sheila Vashee: The way that I always think about it is it’s what people say about you. I think this is a Steve Jobs quote, right? It’s like what people say about you when you’re not there. It’s how you make people feel even when you’re not in the room. And so because of that, it’s the sum total of all of the experiences that people have with your product and your company.
04:11
Sheila Vashee: It’s not just a logo, it’s not just some pretty visuals. And so that’s how I like to think about brand building in general. It’s the end to end experience. It’s how your support reps talk to your customer. It’s how your salespeople interact with, you know, the buyer of your product, and it’s the experience that your product provides.
04:30
Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible, super powerful. And I always tell our team every single person is a note of brand, because every single touchpoint with a company or any node of the company is an experience, and it’s the total sum. And that total sum isn’t constant. It’s constantly evolving. And so it’s really about continuing to think about the end to end experience.
04:48
Sheila Vashee: I completely agree with that.
04:49
Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible. Okay, so you’re eight years old now. Let’s pick you up and drop you in the year 2012, you joined Dropbox as their second marketing hire, and then you actually stayed on through to over $1 billion in annualized revenue. What were some of your biggest lessons learned on brand building as early stage marketing hire at Dropbox?
05:08
Sheila Vashee: What’s so important to know about early stage marketing and early stage brand building is that you were a million in hats. So as the second marketing hire, I literally did everything like some of the most read blog posts from that year were written by me. I was the QA on a lot of our products. I was, you know, in early customer discussions and meetings, we were doing prioritization discussions on what we should be building.
05:38
Sheila Vashee: And so really like early stage marketing is early stage strategy. And in those early days of Dropbox, some of the quote unquote campaigns that we ran also defined our early stage strategy. So we did a campaign for students. We called it Space Race. I mean, if you remember this, you’re definitely a Dropbox OG. Props to you. But it was a competition between schools and we had a gamified and it was, you know, a whole really, really popular thing at the time.
06:07
Sheila Vashee: And that kind of blended into our referral strategy, which a Dropbox was so important for our that that initial virality that the product saw all of the thinking and ideation around, that all defined company strategy, and it was all marketing but blended into other things. So that’s kind of what what makes early stage marketing so fun and exciting is that you’re doing everything, including defining the future of the company.
06:31
Sophie Buonassisi: 100%. That is super, super exciting. And then in between Dropbox and your current company, Figma, you actually served in several other roles, and one of which you actually ran, consumer PR now, I believe, or at least in part had that responsibility in addition to the business side. So I’m curious from those experiences, open Dawn, what those taught you about brand building and then also the consumer side.
06:56
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. And what that may have lended itself to on the B2B side.
06:59
Sheila Vashee: I learned so much about what it takes to actually drive revenue, and I loved that part of the business and that part of operating and brand building is so important and that especially at a consumer company, because many times at a consumer company, when you don’t have a large sales team, the marketing team is responsible for, you know, driving those customers to your product and actually encouraging them and convincing them to buy it.
07:27
Sheila Vashee: Many times that growth doesn’t come easily. And so you learn a lot about what levers you have available to you, how you encourage people through the funnel and through kind of the sales, effectively the sales process. And it was a really great education. Also leading into Figma, because so much of the Figma business is also self-serve, and that’s kind of the nature of a promotion.
07:48
Sheila Vashee: And marketing also has a very big responsibility and a revenue number. They’re here as well. And so it was a great education to really set us up at Figma.
07:58
Sophie Buonassisi: Do you think about brand differently from the consumer experience now? Out of the bid beside it.
08:03
Sheila Vashee: Made me measure the impact of brand differently actually. And that is because I would say less about brand, frankly, and more about how to think about spending behind that, because ultimately, like dollars going out have to bring more dollars in in some way. And we thought a lot about how to measure the impact of that. And I’m pretty proud of how we did it.
08:29
Sheila Vashee: We did match market tests where we would take over one city and compare it to a comparable city, to look at the impact and one city had the full treatment. I mean, TV commercials, billboards, the full deal, and then other markets were kind of more steady state and looking at the comparison and actually looking at the ROI, you could really see the value of that kind of full funnel impact of, of marketing and brand.
08:57
Sheila Vashee: There are a lot of skeptics out there about the importance of that kind of spend, and so it was nice to be able to prove that so clearly from from those kinds of efforts.
09:08
Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible. Yeah, that makes sense. And now, as chief marketing officer at Figma, how do you think about brand building.
09:15
Sheila Vashee: At a macro level? It goes back to kind of what we were saying earlier, which is like it’s the sum total of really everything that we do. And we touched on this earlier, but Figma has a kind of plg business. So much of our brand is created by our customers and how they feel about Figma and what they think about us and how they talk about us.
09:39
Sheila Vashee: And so we spend a lot of time working with them hand in hand, listening to them. It’s really a part of our DNA, and that’s how we’ve constructed the team. Not only do we want to shape our brand, but also we want to be really authentic to our community that has spent so much time with us and loves us, and we want to be authentic to what their needs are and what they care about.
10:00
Sheila Vashee: That’s a big part of our ethos as a company and infuses into our brand.
10:05
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10:24
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10:51
Sophie Buonassisi: I think you can see it through config pictures of your annual conference and just online, like the magnetism towards the brand is highly palpable. Yeah. So you guys have done a great job of it. And you mentioned really interesting and important part, which is you’ve got a lot of individuals through your product led growth motion and you’ve scaled quickly from that.
11:12
Sophie Buonassisi: But now you’ve also built out more of the enterprise global motion. Yeah. How did you actually transition from that product led growth. Yeah. Motion to more of an enterprise motion.
11:21
Sheila Vashee: Yeah it’s a great question. It is formula that a lot of companies try to create. And it’s actually really hard. And it starts off with of course a product people love. That goes without saying. I think also what’s often overlooked is both at Figma and at Dropbox in the early product, kind of the dynamics of the product is a really strong network effect.
11:44
Sheila Vashee: So for Figma, it was everyone. It was a browser based product and it was collaborative from the beginning. And so bringing more people into your file is just naturally part of the product experience. Right. So that created natural expansion. Same thing for Dropbox. You naturally shared, you know, your Dropbox files through through the product with a network of connectors and that or network of people.
12:05
Sheila Vashee: And that had very strong initial network effects. That gives you that early growth push, that early expansion, and then layering on top of that is what I was talking about earlier, which is so important with with Figma, which is just the ethos of the company being really, really close to our customers in the early days. I mean, the founders used to go to people’s houses and be like, how can I help you?
12:27
Sheila Vashee: How can I help you? They Dillon flew to Nigeria to like meet with early Figma users. I mean, we were everywhere. We just wanted to hear what people loved about the product, wanted to hear what they had to say, and that philosophy infuses every part of our team. Our product support team is, you know, talking to customers directly, understanding what’s working, where are their questions, how can we help them and what insights do we need to take back to our product team?
12:53
Sheila Vashee: We have a very big community. As we said, over 200 friends of Figma chapters around the world, which are so important to us. And these are people who are, you know, on a voluntary basis, spreading the love of Figma. And we like hold those groups so dearly to our heart. We have a big design and developer advocate team at Figma, whose literal job is to just be out there helping customers every day.
13:18
Sheila Vashee: Along with that groundswell of user growth and user sharing and that that network effect. We built a team and in our culture, a DNA of just being really close to what those users want. And we take that back into everything we do. And that infused a lot of our enterprise expansion. Right? Because those champions are the ones that went to the company and said, I want to use Figma over anything else.
13:45
Sheila Vashee: Now, what Figma did really well after that was build a team to go after enterprise. And I think this is a place we at Dropbox just waited too long to build. And and Figma did that early. And we have an incredibly strong team across sales, across marketing, across many, many other teams, product support and more. And their focus is to set our enterprise customers up for success, make sure they understand how to use the product, make sure they get the most out of it, make sure that we’re expanding within a company in a really thoughtful way.
14:15
Sheila Vashee: And so that was an investment that Figma made early. And, you know, you can see how successful it’s been in, you know, some of the numbers, I think 95% of the fortune 500, like we have just become, you know, a really beloved product across all company sizes. But it was done very intentionally. And, and Figma made some decisions early that really helped with that.
14:36
Sophie Buonassisi: Do you think that when you talk about the equation of going plg to enterprise, that early formation of a team to actually go after enterprise is part of that? And the reason I ask is because the chief revenue officer of Vanita, Stevie Case, came on, she talked about that. She made this really bold bet and created a team far earlier than they were ready to deploy.
14:56
Sophie Buonassisi: And it was experimental. And it was that step that actually enabled them to to be successful in the enterprise.
15:02
Sheila Vashee: I do think that’s part of it. I do think and it’s frankly, it’s not only building that team, it’s also the optics of the investments. Your customers know that you care and that you’re there when they need you. Because if you’re an enterprise organization, you want to bet on a company that’s going to last and that, you know, is committed to them.
15:22
Sheila Vashee: I absolutely think that’s important not only on the operations side, but also optically for your customers.
15:28
Sophie Buonassisi: Interesting. I mean, I have been a long time fan and user figma, and I think one of the things I’ve noticed from other users the most, being in that user pool, is just the pride that people take. There’s something about, I think, the visual esthetic, the design part of it that plays into that of being able to visually improve and visually create beautiful things.
15:49
Sophie Buonassisi: If you didn’t have that same visual aspect at Dropbox?
15:52
Sheila Vashee: Yeah.
15:53
Sophie Buonassisi: Were there any challenges not having the creative side at Dropbox going from field G to enterprise?
15:57
Sheila Vashee: Dropbox actually did have a fair amount of the creative side, in the sense that what made Dropbox so useful are the, like, bigger, heavier files that were hard to share over email or other means. And so we actually saw in and at Dropbox a lot of video files, a lot of photos, a lot of things that were actually difficult to share in other ways.
16:19
Sheila Vashee: And so naturally, a lot of the creative community did exist in Dropbox. But you make a really important point in that it was a different product, right? It it was meant to kind of help you get the most out of that content and have it wherever you needed it. Whereas like Figma is about creating those types of files and that type of work like Dropbox served all kinds of customers.
16:43
Sheila Vashee: And for Figma, we are focused on people who are in the business of kind of creating, whether it’s design or also, you know, recently you’ve expanded to developers and product and other teams, but that is more of a focus for Figma. Definitely.
16:56
Sophie Buonassisi: Super cool. And you talked a lot about ingesting a lot of feedback from customers and being everywhere, hearing from that and that being a huge advantage for you. How do you actually tangibly ingest it? Yeah. What are you doing to triage all of that feedback all at once? Yeah.
17:12
Sheila Vashee: It’s it’s a big challenge actually. We try a lot of different mean. So we use tools that will, for example, look across a lot of data sets and help surface insights. And that’s across their tools, across social. They’re tools across some of our support tools, etc.. We’re always trying that. I think what’s hard is sometimes you need those like real like life examples, like you need to watch someone and what they’re trying to do.
17:37
Sheila Vashee: We also have an amazing user research team, and they will go in and actually do a lot of live sessions and they keep them open. You can join and watch any time to see how a user is interacting with different parts of our product. It’s a combination of that scaled feedback like, hey, we had, you know, 8000 tickets on this topic and this is a big area we need to build access to.
17:58
Sheila Vashee: Like, hey, I actually watched a user and they struggled when they’re at this point in the product and you need a combo of both to help build intuition on what you need to fill. You know, what you need to fix or what you need to build next. And so we do both, but it’s ongoing challenge to figure out how we can stay on top of all of it.
18:15
Sophie Buonassisi: Well, and you got a tremendous amount of users. So I can imagine there’s just a lot of volume, but it sounds like the quantitative and qualitative marrying are important. Exactly. Back loop. Now how are you thinking about AI at Figma?
18:26
Sheila Vashee: AI is very much a part.
18:28
Sophie Buonassisi: Of what we’re focused on, and we.
18:29
Sheila Vashee: Have been very, very active on AI. So everything from new products like Figma make that give you a new entry point into the product development process to putting AI into all of our existing products like our AI image editing features. And we and also having Figma just show up everywhere. So we were in, we announced the integration with cloud earlier this week and open AI, a couple months ago.
18:51
Sheila Vashee: And so we just want AI to be central to everything we do and be everywhere. So that’s the first part of it. Second, and I think what is, you know, potentially more interesting and exciting is that our customers are asking us how they should be thinking about AI. And so we get to be, you know, in the kind of driver’s seat of those discussions and helping them figure out how to use all these tools.
19:12
Sheila Vashee: And that’s also that that’s very self-reinforcing, because then we can also figure out what do we need to build based on where our customers are seeing challenges. That’s frankly really exciting and a privilege to be asked and be in that kind of type of discussion with our customers. And I think, like, what’s most important for Figma is up AI.
19:30
Sophie Buonassisi: Boosts what.
19:32
Sheila Vashee: You can do and boosts your productivity. But, you know, again, a part of our ethos and what’s so important to us is like that human touch and that human creativity and the person that’s deciding which path to go down. So you might be able to use Figma, make and come up with, you know, 20 different prototypes in 20 different ways.
19:51
Sheila Vashee: You could, you know, build a feature or, or, you know, think about your next product, but it’s the person and their judgment that is actually what differentiates that product that you build and, and how you bring it to life through your brand is still a level of craft that comes from humans.
20:08
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20:59
Sophie Buonassisi: Before you joined Figma, you actually spent quite, quite a few years on the venture side, also really investing in advising startups at best asset from that side. So you sat on the venture side, how did that help you on the operator side and vice versa?
21:13
Sheila Vashee: Yeah, it was such a great experience and I’m still involved in that world. You know, I love to be supportive. I love it because it gives you a really cool vantage point on what’s happening. So you get to meet the most interesting new companies, see what they’re building, see what tactics they’re using. Also, on the market side, you can just kind of stay abreast of what’s happening and also help, you know, support the next generation of builders.
21:37
Sheila Vashee: That’s really important to me. And I’ve, you know, gained so much from this community in the past a lot of years. I’m still young. What are you talking about? A lot of years of my career. And so I love to like reinvest in the community and also learn from them. I mean, every playbook that has worked for us up until now kind of has to be thrown out in this new world.
21:58
Sheila Vashee: Definitely on the marketing side. And a lot of times these earlier stage companies are finding new tactics and new ways to break through. We can learn from that too. And so it’s very much a give and take for me, because I get as much from these, you know, early stage companies as I, you know, give and support.
22:15
Sophie Buonassisi: 100%. And a lot of these especially now I native companies they are running entirely different go to market playbooks. What have you seen that people anyone listening and building should think about that newer companies are doing that perhaps older companies are transitioning to or haven’t yet.
22:33
Sheila Vashee: Yeah, I think a big one, you know, that people talk a lot about is SEO too, like generative engine optimization, especially when a lot of companies have massive SEO teams, right, that have built on content. And, you know, we’ve.
22:45
Sophie Buonassisi: We’ve.
22:46
Sheila Vashee: Built up this whole like site that’s been optimized and like, now what? Right. And so, the a lot of the early learnings are that a lot of that content still works, but it’s kind of back to the early days where like the network of referrals to your site are as important and you need that third party kind of validation.
23:04
Sheila Vashee: And so my point is that it’s a new playbook. And companies that are starting now can build with that mindset today. Right? They don’t have the baggage of what they’ve been investing in over time. So so that’s one example. Another example is, you know, social is back in the mix in terms of like being a major driver of perception and how people see your product.
23:24
Sheila Vashee: And so investing in that and investing in 360 degree conversations. Right. People don’t just want to hear from you, they want to hear from your customers. They want to hear from others who have been using your product. And they want validation on, you know, what they should be doing. And social is how they do that. And we’re back to that being a big part of the conversation.
23:45
Sheila Vashee: Again, you know, companies who are starting now can just start with that as the approach. And so I think it’s just about being flexible and learning quickly and seeing what’s working and pivoting really fast.
23:55
Sophie Buonassisi: Are there any social channels at your particular excited about in 2026?
23:59
Sheila Vashee: Oh, I’ve just been like loving Reddit.
24:02
Sophie Buonassisi: Okay. And there’s a whole Reddit under optimization of.
24:06
Sheila Vashee: 100%. But even just like as a user, I mean, I’m on all the socials. Obviously it’s like part of my job, but Reddit lately has just gotten so good for content discovery and community building. And so I’m very big into Reddit.
24:19
Sophie Buonassisi: Very cool. We’re seeing a lot, a lot of our companies right now really leaning into Reddit for part of the generative engine optimization.
24:26
Sheila Vashee: Totally. That’s that’s a big part.
24:27
Sophie Buonassisi: Because it’s blowing up to your point. Fantastic. Well, this is great. I appreciate you going through her and having us really drop you in these different moments in that career. And there’s a lot of young people now that are looking to enter the workforce, or they’re really in the workforce and they’re trying to build their careers. How has mentorship really played a role in your career and and who are your particular mentors that you found the most impactful?
24:51
Sheila Vashee: Oh, mentorship has been so important to me. And even before I interacted, with mentors who I’d love to talk about. But I’ve just been inspired by people who are trailblazers from, you know, the beginning, right when I was starting that brownie business, I would look at Indra Nooyi and be inspired by what she built with her career and Oprah and so many amazing women who were trailblazing at the time.
25:19
Sheila Vashee: So I’ve always been inspired by what other people have accomplished and created. And in my own career, there have been a few people who have just made me take another look at what I’m doing to make sure I’m doing the best that I can possibly do. I remember, at one point in my career, I was at a company, and Francoise, who was the chief business officer at square at the time, and she’s since moved on and is CEO of another company.
25:46
Sheila Vashee: I was sitting at coffee with her and she was like, are you changing the world in your job right now? Like, are you going to change the world? Because if not, you need to change because that’s how the psyche should be thinking. And that made me pause because I was like, I don’t think I am, actually. And but that is the expectation I should hold of myself.
26:10
Sheila Vashee: And it was great to have her kind of push on that. Another one is Dennis Woodside, who I worked for at Dropbox, who was a CEO at the time. Now he’s, running fresh works and, an amazing leader. I just learned a lot from him on how to operate, how to run a business, and still really close touch with him and get advice from him regularly.
26:31
Sheila Vashee: And, there have been many Yamini Rangan, who’s at HubSpot, such an inspirational female leader. I just take so many of her life lessons to heart. And and so I’ve been inspired by these people, and so I try to pay it back too, because it’s been so important for me in my career, and I think it’s important to pass that on.
26:51
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Yamini is doing incredible work at HubSpot now, is great to see her on stage and this conference and everything. I love the point that you said to you about the perspective of are you changing the world? Or do you feel like your work is impactful, essentially, because I mean, that’s how we think about everything at GTM fund.
27:08
Sophie Buonassisi: And of course, we invest for our returns, for our limited partners. But we’re also looking at are these good companies that are positively impacting the world? Yeah, in their specific domain and capacity, because ultimately the world and positive impact is the sum of all those decisions. And so it is actually a factor for us in terms of our diligence is, you know, is this, to lend itself from Trey?
27:29
Sophie Buonassisi: Is it a good quest, is it positively influencing? And it’s an easy kind of rubric.
27:35
Sheila Vashee: Yeah. That’s wonderful, I love that.
27:37
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. Well, on that note, we are actually redesigning the GTM fund website currently in Figma, so you will see it go live. Thank you to Figma. Oh my gosh, I can’t wait to see it.
27:48
Sheila Vashee: I’m sure it’s going to be incredible.
27:49
Sophie Buonassisi: I’m excited about it. Well, I’ve got one last question for you, but to take inspiration maybe from your early roots, I’ve got something.
27:57
Sheila Vashee: Oh my gosh.
27:59
Sophie Buonassisi: Oh, from our brownie day. Oh my gosh, you’re so thankful. Oh thank you so much.
28:06
Sheila Vashee: And you know I love brownies. Oh these look incredible. Thank you.
28:10
Sophie Buonassisi: So thoughtful. Thank you. You’re welcome. I think it’s really been, you know, not just career. It’s been life for you that you’ve been brand building and. Yeah. And really creating these memorable brand. So thought I could add a little inspiration for this last question, which.
28:25
Sheila Vashee: Is my favorite. This is my favorite treat.
28:27
Sophie Buonassisi: To brownies still to this day. To this day might have to get your recipe in the show notes.
28:32
Sheila Vashee: But the problem is I don’t have a good I didn’t have the best brownie.
28:35
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s the whole point. You don’t want my recipe. You take my logo. There you go. Well, take the logo. I love it, I love it, I well, let’s say from all of your experiences across, if you could give anyone building a brand just one piece of advice, that’s going to be the most impactful thing that they can do to build an enduring brand.
28:59
Sophie Buonassisi: And we’re sitting right here in San Francisco. So maybe we’ll say it’s as impactful as you’re going to throw it up on a billboard.
29:04
Sheila Vashee: Yeah. Look, I think right now, at this moment in time.
29:08
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.
29:09
Sheila Vashee: There’s such a temptation to leverage AI to do a lot of the work and I think that is like a real risk for the marketing community right now, because that will, I think, perpetuate this problem of AI slop, the term of the year, right, that we are already seeing. I mean, when I’m on LinkedIn, I can read posts.
29:35
Sheila Vashee: I’m like, oh yeah, that was that was generated by ChatGPT, obviously. Right. Like it’s very obvious. And so like my push to everyone is just make good shit, period. Make it authentic. It has to have your touch. It has to have that human craft because that is what is going to set you apart. That’s what pushes the world forward.
29:58
Sheila Vashee: Don’t fall into the AI slop trap when you’re creating content, when you’re, building your own brand. Make good shit.
30:06
Sophie Buonassisi: Make good shit for putting it on the billboard.
30:09
Sheila Vashee: I love it.
30:09
Sophie Buonassisi: Amazing. Marcella, this has been fantastic. Where can people find you if they want to follow along your journey?
30:14
Sheila Vashee: Oh, let’s see, I’m probably LinkedIn is the best place. I’m on social, but I’m not a big poster on the other socials.
30:22
Sophie Buonassisi: So probably like find your TikTok.
30:24
Sheila Vashee: Like maybe I’ll start. Yeah, maybe I’ll start becoming a TikTok creator.
30:28
Sophie Buonassisi: There we go. We’re at it. We’ll see it. Yeah, but it’s probably more of be here moonlight channels. But LinkedIn, your main one that will be in the shadows. It’s been a pleasure
