---
title: "Your Marketing Playbook Is Dead"
episode: 76
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Leysan Zigangirova"
guest_title: "CMO, Async (formerly Podcastle)"
date_published: 2026-05-22
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:41:46
word_count: 6573
topics: ["ai-in-gtm", "demand-generation", "brand-positioning", "gtm-strategy"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/leysan-zigangirova-marketing-playbook-dead/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Your Marketing Playbook Is Dead — Full Transcript

> Episode 76 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Leysan Zigangirova.
> Published May 22, 2026 · 00:41:46 · 6,573 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/leysan-zigangirova-marketing-playbook-dead/

## 00:00 — Intro: from Yandex Cloud to a growth-stage AI startup

**[0:00]** (logo whooshes) - Working with Leison Ziganriova, the CMO at Async. You might know them as Podcastle, but they just rebranded, and we're going to get into why. Leison's career is fascinating. She ran marketing for Yandex Cloud, Russia's version of AWS, and then led marketing for Yandex's open source portfolio. Before that, she was at Microsoft. Now, she's taken all of that big tech experience and brought it to a growth stage AI startup. We're going to talk about what breaks when you go from corporate to startup, why she thinks the old marketing playbook is dead, and what it was really like to rebrand a company

**[0:43]** while the product is still changing underneath you. - Hi, everyone. Anthony, thank you so much for inviting. That's a pleasure. - Pleasure to have you here, Leison. One of the things that I thought was really interesting, something you said on our prep call that stuck with me, all that we knew previously just doesn't work anymore. And I'm curious what you meant by that. - Oh, yeah, that's sure, you know, like a week before we had this prep call with you, I listened to a podcast of Leina Rachitsky together with Lena Verner. Lena Verner is one of the, I believe, one of the best growth specialists. She's now chief growth officer in Lovable.

**[1:23]** And when I was listening to her, I noticed that she said that when she joined Lovable and started to do the stuff there, she basically threw away her growth playbook that she was collecting throughout the years, just after several weeks. And then I started reflecting like, is it happening with me when I joined to Async? Because I'm in marketing industry for like 15 years, and I know quite a lot of things, and I have a great experience in that. But I realized that when I joined Async, and we're building the AI product in very fast-moving AI market, I had to relearn a lot of things. And I had to throw my marketing playbook as well.

## 01:24 — "All that we knew previously just doesn't work anymore"

**[2:12]** And it's not only about the tactics and the channels, which are, I would say, different than the traditional products or even the software that I was previously promoting, but it's also about the changes in the mindset. When I say about the shifts in the marketing mix, I have to admit that previously, all of the marketing leaders were mostly investing in two areas when they were promoting the software product. So the first thing is the performance marketing. So a lot of the budgets were spent there, and SEO, so Search Engine Optimization. So these were the two major channels for driving the growth. With AI, and in this AI era that we're all living in,

**[3:00]** the investment shift, the budget investment shifted towards the social media, I have to say. Why is that happening? Because there is no yet demand for everything that we are building. Consumers just don't know what to go and search for. They need to see what AI is bringing, what magic is it bringing. Therefore, the best way to showcase that is to go to the podcasters, to the influencers, to bloggers, to shoot the videos, rather than going to the blogs and writing the content as it was previously. So this is the major shift which is happening across everything related to marketing of AI stuff. The second thing is the anxiety shift, I have to say.

## 03:24 — Why budgets are shifting from SEO to social

**[3:49]** So the anxiety has increased enormously because the spit increased. Previously, you had plenty of time for the experiments. So usually the life of the marketing person looked like I have five to six experiments. They are running for several months, and then I'm choosing one to options and then scale it. Now you don't have time for that. You even don't have time for planning. You just go and do. So as I'm constantly saying that, I started to live in the former mode, so in the fear of missing opportunities because I started believing that whatever I do is either already done, but I just don't know about it, or it's going to be done tomorrow

**[4:33]** because the release bit is so huge, though it's so fast that whatever marketers are doing is being copied in a week or like couple of weeks. So this is like the second big thing which would change that you don't have time for planning, for experimenting. You just go and do relying on your intuition and like on your beliefs, what is the best way for the company? - Yeah, I definitely come from a background where pre-COVID, we would sit down and do annual planning process and you'd lock in that plan for the whole year. Definitely need much more agility now. Practically speaking, I would love if you could walk through

**[5:18]** an actual cadence, how long you do give yourself to run an experiment and what, 'cause I know we're not getting as clean of data as you used to get with performance marketing and SEO, so what are you leveraging to determine if an experiment is working or not working? When do you make the decision to make a change? - Yeah, the funny thing, you just said that you worked in the company where you had these annual plans, so when I just joined Async, the first thing which I tried to do is to get the annual plan. And then just in two weeks, I understood that this is first not possible and this is just going to be irrelevant in a month.

## 05:22 — Weekly planning is the new annual planning

**[5:59]** So then I just refused to craft any presentations or any papers as I did previously. Now we're working in really very agile mode, so we have the weekly planning really quickly. The week we understand what we do, we have the calendar, which is monthly, but the changes are happening on a weekly basis. And we don't plan anything beyond that month, because usually it becomes either irrelevant or the plans on the product side changes, I don't know, the new model is released or something like that. So this is like the new reality, it's probably. That is hyper-compressed. I think even, I would say, we would keep an annual North Star

## 06:00 — Making decisions without clean data

**[6:52]** and a lot of companies would do that. And I think changing the mindset of like, hey, this isn't the locked-in plan, that's just the vision of what we're marching towards. And then I've seen a lot of quarterly planning. I think monthly, that's an elite level of agility if you have that built-in to adjust. But you're right, every single day, there's a monumental shift in AI infrastructure, capabilities, and that can completely change your go-to-market. - Absolutely, absolutely. And you were also asking the question, how to make the decisions in this fast-moving environment, right? So previously, I was relying mostly on data.

**[7:30]** So by nature, I'm very data-driven person, and I was told this marketing basics that you need to look into the numbers, to make really thought decisions. Now, I just don't have this data. So the lag between gathering the data and reality has increased significantly. So now, when I'm asked how I'm making decisions, I usually say that this is the mixture of three things. So it's still data, when it is possible to gather that data. The second thing is intuition. And I believe that this is going to be very human-specific thing. So a lot of people start saying that, look, marketing people are going to disappear in a couple of years.

**[8:13]** There is already an AI agent of the CMO who can do your work. But all of this AI agency, literally, my friend is dropping me the messages that I'm going to be replaced as of tomorrow each week. So it's mostly the joke, but still, I truly believe that one genuine thing that will stay with us, I mean, marketing people is the intuition, is the ability to see just beyond the numbers, to see what its behavior looks like, to understand the larger patterns which are happening on the market. And the third thing, which also helps me to make the decision in this area of ambiguity is how fast I can learn. So I would prefer to go and do and to learn,

**[8:59]** rather than planning stuff till they feel perfect. So this bit of learning is becoming another third argument when making the decisions. - Yeah, if there's an AI agent who's the CMO, then who's the CEO going to fire when the plan doesn't go well? I don't know if that'll ever work. - The CEO is just stopping this AI agent and is going to do another one. (laughing) - This is a fantasy. I don't believe that is going to happen. Again, I tried this AI CMO. That's one of the startups. They became quite popular in Twitter recently, saying that, "Look, we're at least the AI CMO." I tried it. To be honest, it's just not delivering the right data.

## 09:39 — Is the AI CMO coming for your job?

**[9:48]** So they are gathering the insights from different tools and this data is not correct. Second, it's just giving you very ordinary advice. So it's not, you cannot see that there is a professionalism behind that agent. So it's just basic stuff that you can find in the internet. So therefore, at least now, this is not the reality. It's just fun thing to try, but I'm not afraid that this thing is going to replace me, at least for a couple of years. - No, I don't think so. I recently wrote an article about how AI isn't just taking work that needs to be done today. What it does is it unlocks a bunch of work

**[10:30]** that you didn't even know you had the capability of doing. So the people who are really leveraging AI, they're deep in its capabilities and how to get the most out of the tech, really are working more. I see people working all the night. There's some addictive aspects of AI too, but we can talk about that on a different day. But I think it's really unlocking, oh, there's so much more work to be done and there's so much more on my plate now that I can do these things. So I don't think it's taking any way. I don't think it's taking away a lot of jobs. I think it's only gonna create more work to be done. - I agree. I also think that AI is just going to amplify

**[11:08]** really talented people. And those who are not talented by just using the AI, they will not become talented. That is the thing. - I tend to agree. I would love to hear, 'cause you mentioned AI is changing how people are interacting with brands, with interacting with technologies they don't even know they may need yet. So there's a lot of education that needs to be had. What channels in this new AI era are you seeing being really successful and how can you take advantage of them? - I would name two. So first is social videos I mentioned. So Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, all these video interfaces where you can actually show

**[11:54]** how AI tool is delivering the great output for you. So it's not just about writing the text as this large documentation for the software products as it was five or 10 years ago. You really need to show it, to show how it works, that it's very, very fast and that it delivers really high quality outcome. So this is the first thing. Second, which I would believe is a funny thing, is the LLMs itself. So now all of the companies, I think it's right, it's right move, spending some efforts and making themselves visible in chat GPT and Claudio. This is the right direction. So Google is still strong in terms of the share, but a lot of people already started searching

## 12:18 — The two channels that matter most in the AI era

**[12:44]** for the information in the LLMs rather than the traditional search engines. So these are the two media I believe are the most important in terms of the investments. - On the social media side, I do see a lot of B2B companies starting to get into social media, experiment a little bit. Are there any channels that you think work really well with certain types of products? I guess if you think of all the major ones, who should be investing in those channels and why? - It still depends on what you're building. You were giving this example of the B2B. For B2B, it's still YouTube and Twitter and LinkedIn for sure. If you go to the B2C, it's Instagram and TikTok.

**[13:28]** In my case, so I'm working in the creative economics, it is Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. So everything where creators can see how AI can help them in creating the content and amplifying the content. So it's really depending on the product. But if to divide, I would say like B2B, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, B2C, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. It's still the same. The split didn't change much. - Makes a ton of sense. And on the LLM visibility, I know that's increasingly becoming important for companies that we're working with. Do you have any guidance on how to increase your visibility for the models? - Oh, I'm not the best specialist.

## 13:31 — B2B vs B2C: where to actually invest

**[14:09]** I mean, I'm not so technical and there are plenty of articles actually. And there are a lot of companies who are trying to build the business around that. So how to be more visible. But basically, you need to think about the content that you're producing for the blog and for the website content as it is intent-based. So you need to put yourself in the shoes of the user and try to understand how the user is searching for the information about you. So usually it is how to. So how to do something, how to shoot the video, how to become a podcaster, how to, I don't know, earn money, how to do something. So it's always like this intent-based approach,

## 14:34 — How to increase your visibility inside LLMs

**[14:49]** which is in most cases working the best. There is also requirements in terms of the tax length. So previously the shorter formats of the tax worked well. Now there is a requirement around 30,000 characters, I believe. Yeah, and last but not the least is your presence in forums and in the comments and YouTube and stuff like that, because all of the LLMs are grabbing information for creating the answers from the social platforms. Reddit is the number one source for them actually. There was a recent research from understand at Horowitz. So they were doing the research around that. And I remember that was the table,

**[15:37]** which was showing the Reddit as number one source. - That is super interesting. And I think if you don't mind if I can zoom in and double click on the Reddit aspect, how, and maybe let's take a B2B context. If somebody's looking to invest in the Reddit channel, and I know a lot of companies probably haven't even personally used Reddit people in them, what's the best way for them to get started and how do they do it in a proper way? - Yeah, the simple way is to create your branded subreddit. This is the default thing that you get to do. And you just read it the same way as you treat some other social media accounts.

**[16:20]** You just put all the news about your products, some interesting topics that might be useful for your audience and just do the regular posts there. Second, it's a community network, right? So you need to work with this community. So you start with searching for the different subreddits which are related to your target audience or your product area. And you start seeing what people are asking there, start engaging with them, helping users to find out the answers that they are searching for, injecting the information about your product. So this is like guerrilla marketing, I would say, but it is really working. But you need to be genuine

## 16:25 — Reddit as the \#1 LLM source — and how to use it without being sleazy

**[17:07]** because there are a lot of companies which are going to this cheating farm. So they start over promising or overusing the Reddit, going to the subreddits which are irrelevant to your product, become really very pushy, trying to advertise the product. I don't believe that this is working because ultimately it will impact the trust to your product. So the best way is try to help. If you are helping, then the attention will come organically. - Yeah, and I think that's probably really good advice for any channel. If you're going to invest in something, be authentic, be organic, be genuinely helpful. I think anytime a consumer starts to feel like

**[18:00]** somebody is trying to pull the wool over their eyes, then they start to not trust the brand and then it can have an inverse effect. So you start investing in it and it's even worse. You might as well not have done it. - Yeah, yeah, and you know, I saw this message recently that in the current AI era,

**[18:20]** everyone is trying to get growth but not to deliver value. And I see a lot of companies which are so keen on getting the growth, which I'm still a growth person. I understand that my KPI is getting the revenue. So this is really the most, but usually you get the revenue if you deliver the value by the product and by the brand voice of everything that you are doing. So I think some people started to forget about it, unfortunately. - I think it's a great way of thinking about it. Hey, I have a KPI to grow by X, which means I have to go figure out a way to create Y amount of value to go get that. - Exactly, exactly.

## 18:31 — Growth vs. value: the trap most AI companies are falling into

**[19:05]** - One of the things that you recently went through and going through all of the things we're talking about, investing in social media channels, building a brand, building an audience, and then when you're in a position where you need to rebrand. Walk me through, it seems unbelievably painful, but walk me through your process of how you do that. And maybe even before, when is it worth it to rebrand or just continue going on with audience that you have? - Yeah, look, I think I still have this trauma of rebranding that we did recently. All in all, this is the third rebranding in my life. So first one was more than 10 years ago,

**[19:50]** then in five years ago, another one, and this was the most recent. I still believe that rebranding is the most difficult thing in the career of any marketing person. It's very interesting, very insightful, but very difficult, both in terms of the business and the organizational setup. In our case, that was kind of existential question, to do the rebranding or not. Because previously we were known as PodCastle, and just by the name, you can immediately get an understanding that this is the company which is related to PodCastle. And historically, yeah, historically, we started our business and our platform as a platform for PodCasters, but mostly for audio.

## 20:10 — Why Podcastle had to become Async

**[20:39]** We had our own voice model, which was on the working infrastructure for the platform.

**[20:48]** Later, we tried to extend to the video area, but that was not very successful. And we started thinking, how can we do this major shift? At the same time, the market starts changing as well. All of this video generation stuff appeared, all this models like Cling, Sora, Nana, Banana, all of them are booming. So we understood that if we don't move to that area, we don't move to video. And if we stay at the same audio field, we would be dead in two years. So yeah, like maybe I'm a bit exaggerating, but the market, I mean, the audio market is really much, it's not so fast, and it is very, very narrow. So we wanted to extend, and by that time,

**[21:45]** product became more featured. So we added subtitles, we added voiceovers, video generations as well. So it became absolutely different from the PodCastle, which was like four years ago. And at the same time, we also started developing our API. So now Async is the creator platform and the developer platform, so we are selling our API to the engineering teams who are aiming to build the voice agents. And for them, the name of PodCastle doesn't serve even more. So therefore, we took the decision to change to the new name, and it was not just the brand name change or the domain change, it was the complete repositioning. And now if you go to our website,

**[22:36]** you will see that we are a platform which is serving both audiences, the creators and developers, and we're mostly in the video, and we're building the AI video editor with a chat-based interface. So the product has changed completely as well. Coming back to your initial question, that was the reason why we changed. So how we did that, we started, so we made the decision that we're going to change the name in September last year. And we started informing the audience already in November, because one of the fears which I had that our loyal audience is going to, that we will lose them. And for me, the first thing was to make sure that they will not live.

**[23:20]** So we started informing the current people via blog and the emailing and social media that, look guys, we're going to change. The change is going to be significant, but you're still going to get the same value that you used to with the podcasting. We're just extending our use cases. Then in January, we made the change itself. So the product upgraded, we changed the domain, but we did it silently. That was on purpose because we were afraid of some technical issues that might happen. It usually happens actually when you do such a huge transformation. So we changed it and in two weeks we made the growth announcement with the press release,

**[24:05]** with informing across socials that we are now async. That was painful in two cases. I mean, the most pain was coming. First, the organizational pain, because people are emotionally tied to the previous name. So we had the all hands and the people were asking me look why we're changing, podcast is so great name. We feel like we are part of that podcast family and now we're becoming someone new. So it had, we had some, spent some time and efforts to get with CEO. I'm very happy that CEO was on my side, that was his decision as well. So we persuaded people that, look guys, this is the right decision and this is actually opening the new horizons for us.

**[24:58]** The second pain is the loss in terms of the metrics.

## 25:05 — The real pain of rebranding (internal resistance + metric decline)

**[25:06]** When someone is saying that rebranding was not giving some decline or we recovered like immediately, I usually don't believe to that people because it never happens just by like the real things.

**[25:26]** When you change the name and the, and the domain is changing, you immediately lost, lose the branded traffic. The, there are some bugs in the direct visits patterns. The SEO rankings are also lost. So there are a lot of things that you are losing. Therefore your organically see the decline in terms of the revenue, the traffic, the leads, all that stuff. I thought I was more optimistic that the recovery will happen in one month, but it didn't. And that was very difficult, you know, to, to wake up, usually wake up. And the first thing which I do, wake up to the breakfast, I open my laptop and go into the dashboard to see what is happening with the revenue,

**[26:15]** with the subscriptions. And for like two months, I was monitoring the decline. And it's emotionally difficult for the person who's responsible for, for growing the revenue. And now like when two months passed, we started to see the recovery. I was saying like, oh, okay. Because at some point I started questioning myself whether I'm good at market, whether I'm good at marketing person or not, whether we did the right decision or not. You know, there's a constant thinking about the things that you did. So yeah, now we started seeing the positive results. So it took longer. And I think that the growth is going to be still postponed.

**[27:00]** So now it's on the recovery stage, but the real growth should come later. But the positive thing that we started to see on the positive side on the developer platform, because previously API was almost unknown. Now the developer platform is benefiting from the creator platforms. People started to see that we don't only have the video editor, but also the API that teams can utilize. So that is the long story short. - Yeah, I think a lot of people may take the decision to rebrand a little bit frivolously. They may not, I thought what was really interesting is the internal resistance and knowing that people are emotionally tied to a name, a brand, a voice.

**[27:47]** You know, it's one that you're assuming, when we started talking about this, I was really only thinking about the external changes, but really keeping the team feeling cohesive is a big part of it too. I didn't realize that that would be a big factor. - That's true, that's true. And I think this is more evident in the smaller teams, because in the larger organizations, the decision about rebranding or some changes in the brand name are coming just like the decision some head has taken. And they are just presenting that for you. But while you are, when you are a small team, you are still attached to that. So like any change, like significant change

**[28:27]** is really traumatizing, I would say. - Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. Well, and I think knowing what you're signing up for, saying, hey, we're gonna make this decision, especially if it's existential, as you mentioned, hey, this is a big deal, in order to capture market in a way that's gonna be conducive to our growth, we're going to have to do this, we don't really have a choice. That sounds like the right time to do it. Not if it's, hey, maybe we could capture a bit better, maybe this will describe what we do a little bit better, maybe it's a sexier name. Those sound like reasons to not rebrand. Would you agree? - Yeah, that's sure, that's sure.

**[29:04]** - And then because you're signing up for months and months of pain, and you have to have a long game in it where there's something in it for you to make this decision worthwhile. - Exactly, exactly. But I think, again, as I said, for us, this was kind of an existential question, and maybe people like the engineers or some specialists, they just don't understand it, but when we discussed that on the C-level medics, we just all knew that this should happen, this should happen. - Makes a ton of sense. Well, I commend you on your bravery for doing it, and I appreciate you sharing the roadmap for anybody else who's gonna have to go through that type of process.

**[29:49]** One of the things I really like to talk about, because I think there's this idea or ethos out there, especially in the startup community, even more so if it's a hot AI startup, I think a lot of people are reluctant to bring in leadership from big tech, from big companies. And I see you as an example of someone who has taken that experience and turned it into a positive in the type of company you're in now, and I would love for you to walk through that story, maybe some things that shocked you, or how to prep anyone moving from a big corporate environment to a startup. - Look, in my case, in my journey,

**[30:31]** I think I was searching for the startup as a next career step, because previously, I already had quite successful path. So I started, I have always been in marketing, and I was growing quite fast. So I became chief marketing officer in Yandex by 30, so quite young. Yeah, and I was leading the cloud marketing team for almost seven years. So at some point, I started feeling that I did everything, I mean, in the large corporation, that I want to try something absolutely different. And I started searching for the new challenge, and I refused from several offers, which were still coming from the big tech. So intentionally choosing the startup,

## 30:40 — Big tech → startup: what actually changes

**[31:29]** but of course, I wanted the startup to be in AI field, because previously, I was working in a cloud business, cloud was at the edge at that time. So I was always working with some innovative technologies, and I wanted to continue doing the same, but moving to a bit different area. So AI as the booming thing was the right move for me.

**[31:53]** So I moved, and it was still shocking, I would say. And I had to change, though I was still, I mean, now I didn't move the, from fast moving and super goods to the technology area, so it was still technology, but the shift still was required again from the mindset perspective. First, and I think that the major thing, that the resources are really small. And large corporations, it's not only the budget, I mean, the marketing budget, it's also about people, and it's not only about your team. And I think when we work in large corps, we just don't realize that there are a lot of other people in other teams, the processes which are already built

## 32:00 — The three things her CEO hired her for

**[32:44]** are helping you, you're just taking that as a default thing. When I landed to Async, there was nothing, there was nothing in terms of the processes, the budgets are very limited, the team is like three times smaller than I had previously. So another thing which I had to change was the attitude toward prioritization. Of course, we were prioritizing things in the large works as well, but here it has become more ruthless. So you need to think twice what to do and where to invest, but at the same time, the market is changing so fast, so you need to prioritize more qualitatively, but still be fast in making that decisions. So this is a very complicated balance

**[33:32]** which I still didn't figure out yet. But I'm on that, I'm on that. Yeah, I think that's the major thing, but the good side is the absolute freedom. Still in the large organizations, you have a lot of guidelines you need to follow, you have a lot of the bureaucracy, you need to align the decisions with a lot of people. Here, we decide fast, we move fast, and I have a freedom to do whatever I believe is right for the business, just aligning with other people in the CCU and with the CEO. But at the same time, I think not the first, but like the second time in my life, the first one was when I was CEO of Yanda Club,

**[34:21]** I felt how marketing is actually important for the business because I started to feel this raw reality of the business that everything which I'm doing or not doing is actually giving the impact. In the large corporations, it's usually somehow hidden. I remember in Microsoft, we had synthetic metrics, which it's difficult to understand how they impact the overall value that the company is trying to create. Here, this relationships and the impact is immediate. - I think those two things people are always really hungry for when they're looking for a startup opportunity, it's the autonomy and the impact, and it is very difficult to replicate.

**[35:06]** I worked for two big corporations before, and then a multitude of startups before starting LeanScale. Probably the most well-known one would be LexisNexis, so it's a global risk. I worked, they had a risk division, they acquired one of the companies that I was running RevOps for, and that was a complete culture shock for me. And immediately, going from, as you mentioned, every single day, I take an action, I see the impact, and having that connectivity to the results, to really being layered and saying, "Oh, it's gonna take quarters, maybe years, "for some of the things you're working on "to really start taking effect."

**[35:53]** It was a very difficult thing for me to transition into. I actually got a lot of reviews saying, like, "Hey, you need to slow down "and stop being so aggressive in the meetings." (laughing) It's like, "No, we need to get this done in a month," and you don't realize all of the things that need to change in order to implement this. So immediately, I was like, "I don't think I fit in here." Went back to a startup and then started LeanScale. But I think one question I have, for companies that are maybe interviewing somebody from a big tech coming into a startup, what should they be looking out for to make sure that this is a good fit for them?

## 36:13 — Autonomy, impact, and why some people can't make the leap

**[36:30]** Because I was not a good fit for a big corporate, and I think maybe they could have sussed some of that out in the interview process, too. - Yeah, look, I was actually asking that question from my CEO, so why he decided to hire me, though I was coming from the corporate background. So he told me that he interviewed a lot of candidates from the corporate side as well, like from the other companies. And he told me that there are three things that he looked into. So first is ability to be hands-on. So even on the C-level position on the startup, you do some stuff by yourself, just because of the limited resources,

**[37:12]** just because of the speed, so this is the reality. It's not about being a high-level manager, as we used to in the large corporations. So you need to work yourself hands-on, very hands-on. So this is the first thing. Second, courage. Courage to make decisions, because sometimes in the large corporations, the decisions are kind of diluted, so you don't even know who is making that decision, because somehow team decided. Here, of course, we decide as a team, but a lot of the decisions I should make as a person, as a person who's responsible for driving the business, this is the second thing. And third one is agility.

**[37:55]** But this, I believe, is not only startup-specific, but also AI market-specific. You need to be very fast in changing. So, okay, we drafted this plan, this marketing tactics, but tomorrow things has changed, and we need to run in absolutely different direction. And you need to get used to that, to work with that kind of ambiguity. I know a lot of people, a lot of my friends, very successful, very high-paid, but they prefer to work in the large organizations, because they believe it's more safe. They just don't want to deal with ambiguity. They want everything to be structured, to be everything planned. I'm ready for ambiguity. That's it, it's fun.

**[38:40]** - Yeah, I think it takes a special kind of person to enjoy it, and thrive in it. - Exactly, if you don't enjoy it, you will not do that. - No, and I've seen a lot of people try to make the transition, but I think if they're taking a mode of introspection and knowing, hey, what's driving me, what excites me, and if some of those things do, then it's a great fit, you should make the transition. And you bring a wealth of knowledge and organizational structure that I think can make you hyper-effective. You just have to make sure it's the right fit, too. - Exactly, exactly. Another thing that, like, from corporations,

**[39:12]** what people like we can bring to the startups is this discipline and structure. So they are all in structures. I mean, all the startups, especially on the early stage, lack the processes. So what I'm trying to do right now is not only to run and to execute the stuff, but also to build the processes. So in my dream and my goal is that after two, three, five years when I'm done or something happens, the system is still alive. Like, that I'm building not only the business just right now, but also the system which can live and bring growth even if I'm living. - Leison, I really appreciate everything that you've been sharing.

**[39:53]** I've learned a ton during this conversation, and I think a lot of things are really valuable for our audience and the people that we work with. I think your whole idea about the old playbook is dead. The way people are interacting with AI, the way people are interacting with brands and products is completely different. I love the advice of investing in social media, especially in maybe some of those non-traditional ones, like Reddit, people may not be used to how to do that, but I really appreciate you giving that. And then keeping the foundation of being organic, being authentic, and adding value. Whatever your growth KPIs are,

**[40:31]** make sure you're looking to how much value you're gonna add to the market. I also appreciate you going through the pain of doing a rebrand, when to do it, how to do it, what to expect. I know there's a lot of startups that are going through existential changes right now that that's gonna be super valuable. And I am so happy to have an amazing example of somebody making the transition from big tech to startup, taking your organizational structure, expertise, and professionalism to a company that can really use it, but making sure it's aligned with your personal goals and what excites you every day when you're working. So Leyson, I can't thank you enough.

**[41:12]** I appreciate you being on the podcast, and I can't wait to watch what you do next at Async and beyond. - Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Anthony, for inviting. That was really a pleasure to be with you. Very interesting question. So maybe we would see each other, I don't know, in the half of the year or a year, and that would be another episode when I will be telling what change. And I'm sure there will be a lot of changes. - I think we will have to have you back to go through everything that's going on with Async. And I'm sure there are gonna be plenty of changes in AI, and we'll have new perspectives on these problems too. - Of course.

**[41:45]** Sounds like a plan.