20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025
Kieran Flanagan is the CMO at HubSpot, where he’s led the transformation of their growth strategy from SEO-led to multi-channel and AI-powered. Formerly SVP of Marketing, he helped scale HubSpot’s user base to millions and revenue past $2B. Before HubSpot, he drove breakout growth at Marketo and Salesforce. Kieran is one of the most respected voices in SaaS marketing and a pioneer in growth-driven content strategy.
Agenda:
00:03 – The Death of Growth Teams? Kieran's Wild Prediction
06:44 – AI Innovation Pods: The New Org Structure for Startups
10:18 – Email Personalization That Tripled Conversions
13:21 – From Software Budget to Labor Budget: The Shift is Happening
16:35 – The Big Lie: Why Autonomous Agents Still Suck
19:24 – The Secret Sauce Behind HubSpot’s Email AI Stack
21:44 – Segment-Based Marketing Is Dead. Enter Micro Audiences.
24:15 – Content Collapse: Why Google Organic Is Getting Torched
30:52 – The Future of AI SEO: 1 Product, 100 Pages, Infinite Prompts
33:16 – Memory = Moat: Why ChatGPT Is Becoming Unbeatable
35:46 – Prompt Engineering is the New Coding: Here's How to Win
41:03 – The Death of the Middle Manager Marketer
46:17 – OpenAI vs. Anthropic: Kieran’s $400M Bet
48:00 – Europe Is Falling Behind: The Harsh Truth on Regulation
52:39 – CMO Playbook 2025: Micro-Audiences, Creator-Led, AI at Scale
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) interviews the world's greatest venture capitalists with prior guests including Sequoia's Doug Leone and Benchmark's Bill Gurley. Once per week, 20VC Host, Harry Stebbings is also joined by one of the great founders of our time with prior founder episodes from Spotify's Daniel Ek, Linkedin's Reid Hoffman, and Snowflake's Frank Slootman.
If you would like to see more of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), head to www.20vc.com for more information on the podcast, show notes, resources and more.
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