Hey, I’m Louis! I’ve been part of 3 YC-backed startups, helping scale them from just 2 employees to over 100. Most recently, I was the founding PMM at Glide, a no-code platform empowering non-technical users to build their own work software. I joined post-Series A to build and scale the PMM function from scratch. I also spent five years living and working in Kazakhstan—which, in a lot of ways, felt a lot like working at a startup: constant change, navigating ambiguity, and needing to get extraordinarily creative with limited resources.

How to identify the most valuable startup growth stage to thrive?

I think it’s key to understand the growth stages of a startup and then map your strengths and skills to them. Startups typically go through three broad stages:

• The pre-product-market-fit phase is pretty scrappy and experimental, where early teams are still determining whether the product solves a real problem for a specific audience.

• The Series A-B phase is often, but not always, the post-PMF phase, where the product is validated by an early customer base, and the focus shifts to growing users, revenue, or both.

• Series C and beyond is the late-stage phase, focusing more on optimization—fine-tuning processes, hiring specialized skillsets, and expanding the product’s surface area.

If you enjoy the process of creating something from nothing, owning up to ambiguity, and wearing multiple hats, pre-seed and seed-stage startups could be a great place to grow.

At Series A/B, the focus shifts to starting to build repeatable systems. This is often where startups prioritize bringing in specialists over generalists and develop specific functions like demand generation, content, and product marketing.

At Series C and beyond, the emphasis is about doubling down on efficiency, optimization, and adding bench strength to growing teams.

Ultimately, the key to thriving in the early-stage startup environment is aligning your skills and, really, your energy with the startup’s needs.

What are your key learnings from working with early-stage startups?

I can’t recall where I heard this quote, but in startups, you’re more like a gladiator fighting for survival than a senator in a large corporation jockeying for political influence.

Personally, I thrive on building and scaling product marketing with nimble, intimate teams, so Series A/B is definitely my sweet spot. I’ve been the first formal product marketing hire or a marketing generalist a few times, and each experience has been unique. A few things that have consistently helped me stay sane include…

Develop a learning curriculum

Joining an early-stage startup means turning a lot of unspoken, tribal knowledge into something concrete. The first step is going on a listening tour to understand the teams and processes, while also pinpointing areas where you want to dig deeper. I’ve made the mistake of overwhelming myself in the first few months by trying to become an expert too fast. Now, I try to focus on creating a learning path that builds real comprehension, not just surface-level understanding.

Go bespoke

It’s tempting to copy and paste what worked at a previous company or dive headfirst into a new role with quick wins and credibility. But that can lead to problems down the line when you realize the nuances make a one-size-fits-all approach ineffective. The real goal is to co-create a tailored playbook that brings teams and ideas together. The process itself is often more important than the outputs and makes future work like launching a product and working with sales more enjoyable.

Checkers not chess

In larger companies you can often intellectualize problems for longer, and focus more on creating presentations and artefacts that refine decision-making and context. In early-stage startups, it’s less like chess and more like checkers, you need to make a lot of smart, high-quality moves quickly to learn and iterate from them. At Glide, we placed plenty of go-to-market bets that didn’t pan out, but those misses taught us a ton about where to focus.

Where can I find the right startup to join?

In terms of joining a high-growth startup, it’s really about knowing where to look.

There’s still a lot of gatekeeping by recruiters and some of the best roles are still sort of networked-in. Some of my favorite resources are as follows:

• Welcome to the Jungle (fka Otta): Great matchmaking and can choose remote, strong UK/EU coverage.

• Hacker News Who’s Hiring: Monthly thread of early-stage startups that are hiring EPD type roles. Can usually connect directly with the founder.

• GrepJob: Mostly mid-stage and almost Faang, filterable by stack/level.

• Startups.Gallery: This is actually a project I run with my friend Gonzalo Paz, which curates top startups/scale ups.

• Joining a VC's talent networks + their job board: Most of the multi-stage funds have their own job board for their portcos and some of them have (Greylock, SPC, a16z) have their own talent networks)

• Next Play: Ben Lang’s community project that connects founders and early-stage startups with founding team type roles.

If you’re curious to learn more about product marketing, don’t forget to tune in to the PMM Talk, the podcast that serves the product marketing community👇️