Ohad Tzur of NuFund on what investors look for in a marketing team

Ohad Tzur

Hi Etgar, nice to meet you again. Thank you so much for hosting me on your podcast. I'm excited to be here.

Ohad Tzur

Of course. I started my journey back in the day in Israel, born and raised there, following my military service. In university I was fascinated by the world of online. I think we were both part of the generation that had those dial-ups and was introduced to the internet at the end of that era. I started my career at a company called DMG, in the online world, and really learned the basics there. This was around 2007-8, when a lot of budgets were shifting from traditional marketing to the online world, and I thought it was fascinating. I wanted to expand my journey there.

01:34 It was a combination of friends and family that pushed me to apply for an MBA. I was really excited about the opportunity. I knew it was a big stepping stone in my career, maybe my next milestone. I was admitted to MIT, was delighted about that, and spent two fantastic years in Boston. I was then recruited by Google. They came on campus looking for people with online experience, so it was a natural fit, and I had the chance to lead a few global teams in the Google environment.

02:05 I thought I would actually retire at Google and spend maybe the next decade of my career there. But one of Google's AI partners, a company called Ezoic, I had a chance to work very closely with their leadership team, and they ended up giving me an offer I couldn't really say no to. With that, I moved from Silicon Valley down to San Diego. I was there for almost three and a half years, with a small exit, if you will, from an investor who came on in 2019. Then I had a chance to meet my two co-founders to build our first startup, a company called Kahoona, at the end of 2020 and into 2021. Kahoona was a solution to disrupt the first-party data space, offering data to businesses that is very scalable but also very protective of user privacy. I completed the buyout for that company in 2023. After that, I ended up joining NuFund Venture Group, which is one of the biggest investors here in San Diego, and now I'm actually working on my next startup.

Ohad Tzur

I answer that question by first saying it really depends on the stage of the company. I've learned in my career that you can't assess a Series A company and an early-stage, zero-to-one company through the same lens. They have different objectives, different functions, different goals, short term and long term. So it's really important to understand what type of company we're talking about. Generally, let's say it's early stage, and your goal is to increase your followership or bring leads in. You really want to make sure there's alignment between the goals you're trying to achieve and the metrics you define for that marketing team. For example, is the ratio between LTV and CAC prominent at early stages? Probably not, because at that point you're still learning, you haven't figured out your marketing channels yet.

So maybe at that point the goals are more about building a followership. It could be building a followership on LinkedIn, or designing a landing page and bringing in enough inbound leads to explore and learn. When you're in growth stage, let's say you're a company that just raised seed or Series A, you've found product-market fit, and you're in growth stage, I think it's really important to define clear metrics around ROAS, return on ad spend, general ROI, understanding the different channels and how they operate. Maybe there's also a discussion about MQLs, what counts as a qualified lead, and conversion rates, how much we're converting. At that point I'd really build the funnel and hone in on marketing objectives for each stage: how do we bring new leads in, how are we converting them, what's the cycle from lead to close.

Ohad Tzur

I'll tell you a short story here. I had an exchange on a LinkedIn post with a relatively well-known investor called SC Moatti. She's a managing partner at Mighty Capital, one of the venture groups in Silicon Valley. She was writing this post about how founders have to think big, communicate and talk about the vision, focus on the big-picture disruption. I don't disagree with that, I think that's important. But what I've learned is you have to think about the vision, but don't underestimate step one, which isn't just seeing a big vision in front of you. It's also what are the tactical steps to enter the market quickly, get the metrics you need to reach the next milestone of the company. So for example, if you're a company that's now raising a seed round, you have a big vision to change an ecosystem, that's great, but the question that gets asked is what metrics do you need to get you to that Series A or to that next round.

Sometimes the answer isn't just the vision, it's answering with clear goals: I am building product X or feature X, I will have X customers using this, and I will then maintain progress toward that next step. All in all, you're taking another step toward that vision. So to answer your question, I think it's a balance. The vision is very helpful, it gives people the general direction, it's like your North Star. I also think the vision is what really excites people. For example, at Kahoona we had a very big vision of no more personal data in the online space. I think a lot of people were excited about this because it's solving a critical problem and helping move our industries forward. But that vision isn't necessarily a step-one activity. You have to understand how you take your product and bring it to market, and what the next step is in delivering on that vision. So on one hand, communicate the vision to give employees motivation, make sure everyone is aligned with the North Star and where you're heading, and get them excited about the mission. On the other hand, you have to be very clear when you communicate your OKRs, your objectives and key results, for the next year. They should be very tactical: what do I need to do this quarter, this month, this week, in order to get to those goals.

Ohad Tzur

I think it all comes back to full alignment. This is another interesting insight I learned in my career: in very large companies, different teams and individuals can pull in different directions, because the company is already driven on a specific path in the industry, it's growing, and there are resources for different types of activities. In a very small startup you don't have that luxury, meaning alignment is a key point here, and for marketing teams, they have to be entrenched in the overall notion of what the company goals are, what the company's direction is, and what marketing activities align with those goals. That has to be a constant discussion. I've seen more than once a gap between the marketing team and the sales team, or the marketing team and the product team: product wants one thing, marketing wants to communicate something else, and there's misalignment. That usually means issues get created between the product usage, the expectations, and the metrics themselves.

So the first thing is making sure the marketing team is aligned with the direction, in constant discussion with the product teams and the sales teams, and that the process is well defined. For example, where's the handoff between marketing and sales? Is that clear, or is it just going to create finger-pointing, sales saying we're not getting leads, marketing saying no one followed up with the leads? That process has to be discussed and documented. And I think it's the responsibility of leaders to make sure the machine is operating smoothly: leads come in, they're addressed as fast as possible, there's follow-up on the information gathered from those leads, and if sales are talking to them, that information flows back to marketing and product. That's critical. Again, once you build that funnel, it becomes very clear what the goals and the metrics are: what are we trying to achieve, how many leads do we need to actually close sales, how many sales do we need to hit our monthly goals. Then it really runs like a machine.

Ohad Tzur

Knowing how to state that big vision and attract people and get them excited about it, but then really jumping in to say where do we start. By the way, in a lot of cases those two things aren't necessarily aligned. There are endless stories about companies that started with a very small fraction of their overall vision. Amazon started by selling books, that was the brand they built in the first few years, until they actually grew into their vision of becoming the top online marketplace. So I think the biggest lesson that I learned as a founder. It's recommended, and it's part of what you need to do to bring along the influencers and investors who are excited about what you're solving: explain that vision, but also know the plan for where you enter the market. Quite often, in fact, it can work the opposite way around: you have a way to enter the market, and based on your learning you define the vision. The vision may change over time as well. That's one of my biggest learnings.

Ohad Tzur

I actually confirmed this with a book, I'm going to show it to you in a second. I've heard in my career, quite often, people look at Silicon Valley, both the show and what happens there, like at Y Combinator, and say founders must be very young and energetic, that people only invest in young founders. That's a myth. In fact, I think there are a lot of advantages for older founders, in their 40s plus, just because of their experience. There's some tendency for investors to prefer founders who are doing it a second or third time. They may know how to deal with ambiguity, or some of the rough patches that startups go through. So that's just a myth that exists.

The book that I wanted to show, I'll explain, is called Disciplined Entrepreneurship. It's a book by Bill Aulet, who's actually one of my instructors and professors at MIT. He wrote this book using a lot of the research done at MIT on startups, and he says the research shows that from a thousand successful startups that came out of MIT, the average age of founders was above 40, or something like that, I don't recall exactly. That's one of the things he completely debunked there, and it's really a lot about experience. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against younger founders, sometimes they represent the perspective of the younger generation, the Gen Zers of the world. But experience is something that's very valuable within a founding team. I actually read this research, and as a 40-plus guy myself, it gives me a lot of optimism.

Ohad Tzur

A question I don't know the exact answer to, maybe there are multiple perspectives on it, is whether it's best to be a solo founder, a duo, or more. I've gotten mixed feedback on this. Some people say if you can have a team of four or five founders, that's great, because you have more high talent working relatively cheap, or for equity, and you can move the company much faster.

Ohad Tzur

That's a really good point. When I'm trying to assess a marketing team from an investor standpoint, I look at three different things. First, touching on something we talked about, is there a coherent story and alignment between marketing and product? Meaning, when I hear a story from a product manager or an engineer on the team, and I hear something completely different from marketing, it's a question mark, it's a problem, because I'm not sure who the ICP is, who the audience is for this, and whether marketing fully understands what the product is doing. So again, this alignment, a complete open bridge and open communication between the marketing teams and the product teams or engineering teams, is critical. That's number one.

Number two, I do want to know that there's experience on the marketing team, expertise. If you're a company targeting B2C or consumer solutions, or if you're a B2B enterprise solution, those are very different tactics, channels and experience, and you want that experience on your team. So I want to know who's the person in charge of marketing, do they have a fit with the customer, have they ever talked with these types of customers, and what experience they bring to the table. Then number three is the data orientation. You can see some startups that are sloppy, not set up properly with data tracking, versus those who have more tools for data. It's really critical that there are tracking tools, and the infrastructure to do this, to ensure marketing teams are operating on data, goals and metrics, and that it's tracked.

Ohad Tzur

I think they'll be very similar to what we discussed previously: ROAS, or just ROI, and marketing spend in general. There was a blog post by Neil Patel, who's one of the well-known thought leaders in the space, saying that companies sometimes spend much more than they're earning, in terms of dollars. I think it was $2.60 spent for every dollar earned, which makes you question, why am I spending on marketing, is it because everyone is doing it or not? I want to see that there's some efficiency, that they understand what the cost of acquisition is, what the best-performing channels are, or what more relevant channels they're testing. I think that's obviously important, conversion rates, understanding funnel metrics, how many leads come in the door, how much are you converting, what's the ratio between lead and close. How much time from your team is also spent on it, do we have the operation to make sure the company is constantly growing. Then the final thing, and you could question whether it falls under marketing or not, is churn. How are customers using this product, is it daily engagement, 30-day active users, is churn very high at some point? It's really important to understand if there's stickiness around the product.

Ohad Tzur

I'll take this from what I've seen at an early stage: before you start pushing marketing and investing so much in advertising and creating content, just ask yourself, do you understand your audience, do you understand your targeting? Now, don't get me wrong, experimentation is great, if you're trying different types of content for inbound marketing, or different channels for advertising, that's great. I would highly recommend avoiding that before you're clear on your target audience, before there's enough founder-led sales, enough experimentation and learning tying the product to the market. I've seen, time and time again, a lot of waste going into campaigns that didn't generate the right messaging for a product, and that usually doesn't yield the right growth and the right conversions that the team expects to see.

Ohad Tzur

I always like seeing new startups. I'll give you a few examples, some of them are maybe known, some less so. The first company I'll refer to is a company called turntable.fm. I think it started around 2010, by Billy Chasen. They basically had a platform, think about this almost as a chat room that's visual, with avatars, where you can actually play music. Turntable is basically like a party, there are DJ stands, you can go on the DJ and play a song from the list. They had licensing, or you could also tie in your Spotify, and just play songs. It was almost like a social network that's visual, around music. What I really liked about their marketing is they would bring in brands to sponsor these music rooms and engage with people, because anyone can set up this room for themselves and come be DJs.

So you're basically bringing the brands and the sponsors and the DJs together, and the DJs are users who invite their friends, that's how they got scale. Think about how viral that went. I remember we used this when we were at MIT, it was pretty fun. So that's one. The second one is a really nice marketing approach that I liked from Ezoic, also a company I worked with. We had a lot of different solutions for publishers, as well as layout optimizations, and more. One of the things they were able to offer for free to the market was an ad rate index. Just looking at all the different networks we worked with, and all the different campaigns, we could explain, as an index, whether marketing dollars were up or down on a given day.

It's a big discussion in the marketing environment, always, why is the campaign down, why am I seeing lower CPMs or higher CPMs, sometimes it's just pure seasonality. This ad rate index is a free tool where you can go and see what's happening in your campaign versus the index of the market in a given market, which was a really nice way to draw attention and bring people to use your solutions. And then finally, this isn't necessarily a startup, but there's a well-known seed investor called NFX. They have a headquarters in Silicon Valley and also in Israel. What I really like about their marketing is their content: the quality of the content they use to attract founders, to get them more engaged with the different activities they do, is phenomenal. I've learned so much from that content, I follow and read almost every article they share. That's a really good example of not just sharing content because you need to gain followership on LinkedIn, but really to educate the market and bring people to engage with you in different ways.

Ohad Tzur

Correct, it's a great approach.

Ohad Tzur

There are probably so many things I would try to teach the inexperienced Ohad of 15 or 20 years ago. The one thing I would probably say: very early in my career I thought it was all about the brand. I wanted to work with a certain brand, or I wanted to work at a company that had a big name. I would recommend to younger Ohad, focus on skill: what experience, what skills can you gain from a given path or milestone in your career? Instead of saying I'd like to work for Google, really focus on what experience or skill you want to develop from this next role, because that's going to help you tremendously in the following roles as well. It probably took me at least some time to realize it's really about gaining the skills, the knowledge and expertise, maybe in a given market or industry, instead of just the brand attached to it.

Ohad Tzur

You didn't ask me about failures. Here's my general approach to this. I once tried this in a presentation, I think it actually went well: you can go into a presentation and introduce yourself and say, here's all I did, I went to MIT, I worked at Google, and more success, and more success, and you come across as, oh my God, this person is like a superhero, everything they do turns to gold. That's not the case at all for me, and I think it's not the case for almost anyone. It's just that when you look on LinkedIn, it's a very biased perspective of the world, everything seems like everyone's raising money, everyone is always being very successful. In reality, I had many failures in my career, on things I could have done better, whether it's making the right decisions, managing communication better, managing team members much better, and all these failures, I think, are great learnings. The approach to take is, first of all, don't fear failing, but try to take them as a learning experience to do better next time. People who had multiple failures and really learned from them, you can see how they advanced and moved forward in their career.

Ohad Tzur

Thank you so much, Etgar, thank you for having me.