Your Board Doesn’t Want a Marketer — They Want a Builder
A candid look inside the boardroom with Jake Saper of Emergence Capital.
The modern CMO is facing a reckoning — not because marketing has become less important, but because its strategic weight inside the boardroom has never been higher.
Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital (backers of Salesforce, Zoom, Veeva, Gusto, and a new wave of AI-native startups such as Bland, Bolt.new, Together.ai, Unify and others), sits on some of the most influential enterprise software boards in the world. He has a front-row seat to how marketing leadership is being evaluated — and redefined.
It’s no longer about pipeline.
It’s about capital allocation, velocity, and narrative power in an AI-transformed market.
Here’s what boards are actually looking for from their CMOs:
1. Boards are Valuing Slope Over Experience
“I’ve seen CEOs recently, in a CMO search, opt for the high-slope, low-experience people over the experienced ones. It used to be that you’d look at someone who worked at six relevant companies, think, ‘they know the playbook,’ and want them to bring it here. But in a world where you have to rewrite the playbook, that experience can actually be not helpful — or even negative — because you’re anchoring on things that worked in the past.”
Jake made it clear that boards and CEOs are no longer defaulting to pedigree. Tenure at a big brand or a familiar SaaS logo isn’t enough anymore — and in some cases, it’s a liability.
What they want to see is slope — the steepness of a leader’s trajectory. That means:
Demonstrating you can adapt to new market dynamics fast.
Thinking independently, not pattern-matching old solutions.
Bringing energy, curiosity, and problem-solving horsepower into the room.
Cameron O’Brien and Amber Weinberg from Aperture Partners echoed a similar sentiment last week — that founders are looking for marketing leaders who can grow with the moment and not just replicate the past.
Check out my full conversation with Jake on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
2. Boards Want First-Principles Thinkers
“What I want in a conversation with a CMO candidate isn’t a résumé recital — it’s a dynamic problem-solving discussion. I might say, ‘The pricing model we’re using isn’t working. What would you do?’ There’s no perfect answer — but how they think is everything.”
Jake’s message was clear: boards are less concerned with what a candidate has done and far more interested in how they reason through complexity.
The market is moving too fast for static answers. What matters is a leader’s ability to:
Break big, ambiguous problems down to their fundamentals.
Ask sharp, strategic questions that reveal depth of understanding.
Think in systems, not tactics.
This is what separates operators from strategic partners. First-principles thinkers don’t just react to shifting conditions — they help define the path forward. In a boardroom setting, that’s the kind of thinking that earns a voice in the real decisions.
3. Boards Expect CMOs to Think Like Capital Allocators
“When I think about someone with the C-level title, the question I want to ask is: if you’re going to be on the executive team here, how should we spend our money? It’s less, ‘show me the funnel,’ and more, ‘how should we invest across the business to drive growth?’”
Boards aren’t just evaluating marketing leaders on pipeline anymore. They’re evaluating whether CMOs can sit at the same table as the CFO — shaping investment strategy, not just defending spend.
That means:
Understanding the company’s cash position and critical milestones.
Tying marketing investment to revenue leverage and strategic inflection points.
Recommending where dollars should flow — and where they shouldn’t.
The CMOs who stand out in boardrooms are the ones who speak the language of tradeoffs and return on capital. They can articulate why a specific investment matters in the context of the company’s long-term trajectory, not just quarterly pipeline.
4. Boards Expect CMOs to Own the ICP Conversation
“The best early-stage marketing leaders are leading the effort to define and institutionalize an ICP.”
ICP work may not make headlines, but in early stage boardrooms, it’s one of the sharpest strategic levers a CMO (or Head of Marketing) can pull.
Jake described the ICP arc as an hourglass: cast a wide net early, then narrow aggressively to the segment with the strongest pull — only expanding outward once you’ve earned it. CMOs who lead this work bring clarity to chaos, ensuring the company grows intentionally rather than reactively.
Owning ICP isn’t just about targeting. It’s about discipline. It’s about making choices — and standing by them when the temptation is to chase every logo. Boards are paying close attention to who brings that level of focus to the table.
5. Boards Expect CMOs to Keep Up with Velocity
“The very best companies in this era are going from zero to a million in four months. Some are hitting $100 million in less than two years. Things are growing much, much faster than they used to.”
The clock is moving faster — and boards know it. Especially in AI-native markets, growth is measured in months, not years. That means marketing can’t be a drag on velocity. It has to amplify it.
CMOs who stand out are the ones who can:
Build lean, high-output distribution engines that scale quickly.
Operate with urgency and strategic clarity.
Turn early momentum into sustainable loops that create compounding advantage.
Velocity isn’t just a GTM metric anymore — it’s a strategic differentiator. Boards are watching closely to see which leaders can translate narrative into motion and motion into market position. The ones who can’t keep pace don’t last long.
Closing Thoughts
Jake made an observation that every marketing leader feels in their bones: the CMO seat might be the hardest in the C-suite.
It sits at the intersection of every critical function — product, sales, finance, pricing, customer experience — and the expectations have never been higher. Boards know this. They see how wide the aperture has become.
But his most important point was this:
“If you’re not feeling anxious right now, you’re doing something wrong… There’s so much change happening in your job, in society, in technology. Anxiety is data that the changes are afoot and you have to figure out how to fit into this new picture.”
Anxiety is proof you’re awake to the shift that’s happening all around you. The market is moving faster than the playbook. Channels are evolving in real time. Pressure isn’t something to escape from — it’s the weight of being in the arena when the game is being rewritten.
Boards don’t expect certainty. They expect clarity under pressure. They expect leadership in the unknown.
The CMOs who will define this era won’t be the ones who silence their anxiety — they’ll be the ones who turn it into fuel. They’ll stand taller in the tension, bring conviction when others hesitate, and help build the future instead of waiting for it.
Anxiety is more than a warning sign.
It’s an invitation.