Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career | Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian, Miro, Segment, 1Password)

April 30, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Carilu Dietrich, former CMO at Atlassian and advisor to hypergrowth companies like Miro, Segment, and 1Password, shares lessons from scaling businesses from $30 million to $500 million ARR and building an executive career. She emphasizes relentless effort, strategic company choices, and product excellence as foundations for outsized success, drawing from her experiences across economic cycles.

Accelerating Your Career

To reach executive roles, Dietrich stresses working harder than peers early on—staying two hours later daily compounds experience over years—and volunteering for extra responsibilities, like her stint running product betas as a PR manager. This builds cross-functional insight and demonstrates appetite for more. Psychologically, it requires accepting trade-offs like less family time, but success demands no shortcuts: learn business finances to speak CEO language, tour departments for system-level understanding, and nurture relationships through reliable help. In downturns, endurance matters—top executives endure layoffs or gaps without settling for poor fits, using the time to chase high-profit waves like SaaS over nonprofits.

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What you'll learn

1 **(00:05:14) Building an executive career**
2 **(00:09:49) Picking high-momentum companies**
3 **(00:15:26) Life philosophies from Post-it notes**
4 **(00:16:32) Job hunting and advancing in downturns**
5 **(00:19:26) Lessons from expensive brand advertising**
6 **(00:24:21) Traits of hypergrowth companies**
7 **(00:31:49) Driving word-of-mouth growth**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

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Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the Head of Marketing who took Atlassian public. These days she’s an advisor to CEOs and CMOs of hypergrowth B2B companies and has worked with companies like Miro, Segment, Bill.com, 1Password, Productboard, Sprout Social, Weights & Biases, and more. In today’s episode, we discuss:

* Patterns across the most successful hypergrowth companies

* How to advance in your career, and how to someday become an executive

* How to decide which company to work at

* Advice for navigating the job market during tough times

* How to find and execute new growth opportunities

* Why most CMOs and CPOs get fired, and what we can learn from this

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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-achieve-hypergrowth-in-your

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Where to find Carilu Dietrich:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hypergrowth-advisor/

• Newsletter: www.carilu.com