Senior marketing leadership for portfolio companies.
I can work with portfolio companies from venture capital and private equity firms and switch operational modes, depending on the stage of the company. I can run either the velocity playbook for venture-backed scale, or the efficiency playbook for value creation and exit, or a hybrid of something in between.
Why I work as a fractional VP Marketing for VC & PE?
Most portfolio companies lack the senior marketing leadership they need at the moment they need it most — right after close, or in the run-up to an exit. A full-time VP Marketing hire takes six to nine months and a six-figure retainer before they're productive. A junior marketer can't hold the line in front of a board. As a fractional VP Marketing, I bring a senior voice in the room without the overhead of a full-time executive.
I've done this work from the inside. I led marketing for DarwinAI prior to its acquisition by Apple — a company whose brand and talent made them visible to the right acquirer.
The two operational playbooks I run.
VC and PE demand opposite things from marketing. Here's how I shift my work depending on the fund behind the deployment.
The Velocity Playbook
In a VC portfolio, my mandate is usually market capture, category design, and rapid scale. I'm often working with a product that is still finding true product-market fit or trying to aggressively own a new space before competitors do.
Top-line growth & velocity — ARR/MRR growth, market share, and user acquisition.
- Building from scratch — no historic data, no established brand awareness, and tech stacks held together with duct tape.
- High-burn environment — managing a cash-burning runway and needing to show enough hockey-stick traction to unlock the next funding round (Series A, B, C).
- Growth hacking & aggressive performance marketing
- Category creation & community building
- Organic inbound loops
The Efficiency Playbook
In a PE portfolio, the company is already proven, stable, and revenue-generating. My mandate is value creation, predictable systems, and margin expansion to prepare the company for an exit in 3 to 5 years.
EBITDA growth, enterprise value expansion, and capital efficiency — CAC payback periods, LTV:CAC ratios, and Net Revenue Retention.
- Breaking legacy habits — old-school sales teams or founder-led marketing that relies on relationships rather than digital pipelines.
- Fixing leaky buckets — cleaning up messy CRM data, mapping actual customer journeys, and fixing unoptimized pricing or packaging.
- High-intent account-based marketing (ABM)
- Pricing optimization & customer retention / cross-selling
- A predictable, repeatable demand-gen machine
The two different operational playbooks.
| Playbook dimension | VC Portfolio Marketing | PE Portfolio Marketing |
|---|---|---|
| Budget Strategy | Growth-at-all-costs (within runway constraints) to capture the market. | Highly optimized; every dollar must yield a clear, measurable ROI to protect EBITDA. |
| Data Maturity | Low historical data. I test to discover benchmarks. | High historical data. I audit to optimize existing benchmarks. |
| GTM Motion | Product-Led Growth (PLG), heavy digital ad spend, virality, content authority. | Sales-Led, Account-Based Marketing (ABM), field marketing, strict pipeline attribution. |
| Customer Focus | Net-new logo acquisition and broad market awareness. | Protecting the base (reducing churn) and expansion (cross-selling / up-selling). |
| The Exit Horizon | Positioned for a massive strategic acquisition or an IPO. | Positioned for a secondary buyout (flip to another PE) or strategic sale. |
Two companies. Two acquisitions.
DarwinAI
I led marketing for DarwinAI prior to its acquisition by Apple — a company whose brand and talent made them visible to the right acquirer.
TWG → Deloitte
I was Marketing Director for The Working Group (TWG), a digital product firm whose brand strength contributed to its acquisition by Deloitte.
Rangle.io
Head of Marketing through revenue growth from $1M to $20M and a team scaling to 150 in four years — the kind of trajectory diligence looks for.
More on these engagements in the case studies and about pages.
You might be a fit if…
- You're a VC partner and a portfolio company needs senior marketing leadership before the next round — without a full-time hire.
- You're a PE operator and a portfolio company's marketing isn't repeatable, measurable, or exit-ready.
- A portfolio company is between marketing leaders and needs senior coverage.
- You want one senior leader who can run diligence, build the 100-day plan, and prepare the brand for exit.
- You'd rather deploy one fractional VP across multiple portfolio companies than hire three juniors.
Strategic Advisory
~10 hours/week — board-level guidance, value-creation planning, and coaching of in-house marketers across one or more portfolio companies.
Embedded Execution
Up to 20 hours/week, minimum three-month commitment — hands-on GTM rebuild, positioning, and demand-gen for a single portfolio company.
Project-Based
4–12 week scoped engagements — diligence assessment, 100-day plan, or exit-readiness brand audit, fixed scope and deliverable.
Full engagement details on the services page. New to the fractional model? Read the fractional CMO guide.
Ready to talk about your portfolio?
I take on a limited number of portfolio companies at a time. If you're a VC partner, PE operator, or founder at a marketing inflection point, I'd love to hear where the company is headed.