20Growth: Inside Kraken’s $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn’t and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta
🎯 Summary
20Growth Podcast Summary: Inside Kraken’s $1.5BN Growth Playbook with Mayur Gupta
This episode of 20 Growth features Mayur Gupta, CMO of Kraken, detailing his extensive experience across high-growth tech companies (Spotify, Freshly) and traditional CPG (Kimberly-Clark), focusing on the evolution of growth engines, particularly in product-led organizations and the crypto space.
1. Focus Area
The discussion centers on Growth Strategy and Marketing in Product-Led Growth (PLG) Environments. Key themes include the relationship between brand and performance marketing, the structure of a modern growth engine, the role of marketing when product virality dominates initial growth, and adapting to the shift toward AI-driven discovery (LLMs).
2. Key Technical Insights
- Quality of Insight Over Experimentation: The “magic” in a growth engine comes from the quality of the insight that feeds it, rather than simply running numerous, undirected experiments. (Example: Spotify’s discovery of how background color resonated differently with active vs. passive listeners).
- Growth Engine Components: A mature growth engine requires the seamless integration of Data, Engineering, Design, Product, and all elements of Marketing. Where these components sit organizationally is less important than ensuring they are “hooked in and humming together.”
- Evolving SEO for LLMs: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will not become less important, but the optimization strategy must change dramatically to focus on how to be discovered and recommended within Large Language Models (LLMs), rather than just traditional search algorithms.
3. Market/Investment Angle
- PLG vs. CPG Marketing Authority: Founders in PLG companies must understand that the marketing function has inherently less P&L authority than in traditional CPG, where marketing is often the only growth lever. Comparing the two leads to unnecessary anxiety for PLG marketers.
- Prioritizing Product-Market Fit (PMF): Founders should resist the “drug of paid marketing” until they have rigorously proven PMF. Investment must first go into the “zero to one” stage to ensure the product is sticky and provides core value before attempting to scale growth mechanics.
- Organic vs. Paid Diversification: While maximizing organic growth (SEO, referrals, product-driven virality) is crucial, companies cannot ignore paid channels when competition is spending heavily (e.g., $600M annually). Growth strategy must involve building a paid engine to capture market share that organic alone cannot reach.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Mayur Gupta: Current CMO at Kraken. Previous roles include leading growth at Spotify, CMO at Freshly (acquired by Nestle), and the first Chief Marketing Technologist at Kimberly-Clark.
- Spotify: Used as the primary example of a company where initial growth was overwhelmingly product-led, forcing marketing to integrate as a supporting engine rather than the primary driver.
- Kraken: Illustrates the transition from a decade of purely organic, word-of-mouth growth to needing a conscious, data-driven marketing engine for the next phase of scaling.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
The discussion touched upon the shift in discovery mechanisms driven by AI, which implies a future where the “rules of the road” for visibility (similar to past Google algorithm changes) will be set by LLM providers, creating a new, evolving compliance/optimization landscape for brands.
6. Future Implications
The industry is moving toward a future where product experience is the primary magnet, and brand is enhanced by marketing rather than built by it. Furthermore, the next major growth challenge will be mastering discovery within AI-powered interfaces, requiring new optimization practices and likely leading to a surge in specialized agencies focused on LLM visibility.
7. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for CMOs, VPs of Growth, Product Leaders, and Founders (Series A and beyond) in tech, especially those operating in product-led or crypto environments who are struggling to define the role of marketing post-initial viral growth.
Comprehensive Summary Narrative
Mayur Gupta’s conversation with Harry Stebbings traces his career arc from engineering to leading growth at scale, emphasizing a core philosophy: “Make your product your strongest marketing channel.” Gupta argues that the historical separation between brand and performance marketing is a mistake, especially in product-led companies.
Gupta shared two major personal learnings: first, the necessity for leaders in fast-moving organizations (like Spotify or Kraken) to thrive in healthy chaos rather than imposing stifling structure. Second, he highlighted the critical mindset shift from having all the answers to asking the right questions to leverage expert teams.
A significant portion of the discussion tackled the role of marketing in PLG companies. Gupta contrasted the authority of a CPG CMO (who owns the P&L because marketing is their only lever) with the PLG marketer, who must prove their value as a “new organ.” In PLG, brand is built first by the product experience and second by users; marketing’s role is to enhance and scale that foundation, starting with data-driven proof of incrementality before attempting brand storytelling.
Gupta advised founders to maximize organic growth levers first—product-driven growth, referrals, SEO—before succumbing to the “drug of paid marketing.” He stressed that true growth unlocks happen when organic curves begin to saturate, signaling the need for paid acquisition. Finally, he addressed the future of discovery, asserting that while SEO mechanics will change due to LLMs, the need to
🏢 Companies Mentioned
💬 Key Insights
"Is growth about 1% improvements, lots of them, they add up, or is it about needle-moving swings, new product, bam? It is 90% basis-point movements with compounding impacts and many of them, but keep 10% to still try the next big swing."
"We tried a phrase on a landing page which focused on the traditional ELMR framework, and it said, back in the day, we would say, 'Come to us because this is what our product does.' To really changing that to respond to their psyche, and we changed that to a phrase called 'Trade like a pro.' This is what our pro product, and we saw a substantial basis-point lift because we were now connecting our core message to the desire that our users had to achieve a status, to be part of a tribe."
"We shared $1.5 billion in net revenue, not gross, net revenue. Hopefully, I'm back here next year, I can—we can talk about 2025 growth. We shared our volume, we shared the number of funded accounts... assets on platform, you know, close to $50 billion. We shared our volume, which is almost three-quarters of a trillion dollars on platform last year."
"If you have $100, make sure you're using enough of the $100 or all of it to hit the numbers you need. That's your oxygen. Then I think about this upper-funnel spend... is nutrition."
"I'm reminding myself not to use the word 'brand'—the upper-funnel spend is nutrition, is good food... You won't die if you didn't have it. You will eventually die."
"The reality is you pick the ones you can measure more directly and easily. Stop there. Because I feel that spending on growth or spending in a product-led company is like your oxygen supply. You have to be able to prove what you are getting back."