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The CEO evangelist and the scaling trap

Writer: Alberta
Alberta
Oct 26
6 min read

Updated: Oct 27

Founder-led marketing works. Until you hire the next 100 people.


In May 2019, Sam Altman sat down with StrictlyVC's Connie Loizos and was asked what makes a good founder. His answer was blunt: to be an effective CEO, "95% of your job is effective communication, evangelism". The rest of his sentence matters as much as the number. He meant telling the company's story to the people you're trying to hire, keep and sell to.


A year earlier, at Y Combinator's Startup School, he had made the same point from another angle. Every startup, he said, needs at least one evangelical founder, usually the CEO: someone who can get the whole world excited about what the company is trying to do.


I agree with him. Most of the SaaS companies I've worked with won their first customers through founder-led marketing: a founder who told the story better than anyone else could.


But there's a second half to this that rarely gets said out loud. The thing that makes a founder-led story powerful at 20 people is that it lives in one head. That is exactly what breaks it at 200.



Founder-led marketing at scale: on the left, one lighthouse beam lights a few boats on a dark sea; on the right, a harbour at sunset where every boat carries its own tagged lantern.


OpenAI: founder evangelism at full volume


If you want to see founder-led marketing taken to its limit, look at OpenAI.


  • No CMO for nine years. OpenAI was founded in 2015. It hired its first chief marketing officer, Kate Rouch from Coinbase, in December 2024. By then ChatGPT already had around 250 million weekly users.

  • Launches from @sama. Altman announced ChatGPT himself on 30 November 2022. In February 2025, the roadmap for GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 arrived the same way: a first-person post on his own account, admitting the product line-up had become too complicated.

  • The tour. In May and June 2023 he went on a world tour of around 16 cities on five continents, from Toronto and Lagos to New Delhi and Tokyo, meeting users, developers and heads of government.

  • The podcast circuit. Lex Fridman (2023 and again in 2024), Joe Rogan (episode #2044, October 2023), and Bill Gates's Unconfuse Me (January 2024).


Before anyone copies this, a caveat. It is not a playbook. ChatGPT was one of the fastest-growing consumer products ever, and the press would have covered OpenAI whoever ran it.


Most B2B SaaS companies don't get a product that sells itself, or journalists waiting for the founder's next post.


What OpenAI does show, in exaggerated form, is how much of a company's story can end up running through one person.


The contradiction


On Joe Rogan's show, Altman said that at OpenAI the CEO is far from the most important person in the company. I think he meant it. The breakthroughs came from researchers, and he has said so often.


And yet the story still runs through him. When people talk about OpenAI, they mostly talk about Sam Altman. When the board briefly fired him in November 2023, it became one of the biggest business stories of the year.


That isn't really a contradiction in Altman. It's a contradiction in us. We find one face easier to believe than a team. A team is abstract. A person has a voice, a history and a point of view, and we can decide whether we trust them.


Why one face beats a team (probably)


There is some research behind this, though it needs careful handling.


In 2014, Yale researchers Rosanna Smith and George Newman ran a set of experiments on how people judge creative work. In the first, 222 people looked at the same sculpture. The only thing that changed was how many people they were told had made it: one, two, three or five. The fewer the makers, the better people rated it. A second study, with 268 people, found the same pattern for a painting and a poem.


Their explanation is that when one person makes something, we picture that person's effort more vividly, and we read the effort as quality. A third study suggested that what people believe about who made a work can matter more than how many people actually made it.


Now the honest caveat. These were tests of art and poetry, not software purchases. Nobody has shown that a B2B buying committee rates your platform higher because they link it to one person. So treat this as a plausible mechanism, not proof. It does match what I've seen, though.


Buyers remember the founder who explained their problem back to them. They rarely remember the company.


The scaling trap


A founder's story works because it lives in one head. That head knows why the company exists, which customers matter most, what the product will never be, and which competitors to ignore. In the early days that's enough, because the founder is in every pitch, every investor meeting and every hiring conversation.


Then you hire the next 100 people. Remember Altman's definition: the job is telling the story to the people you're trying to hire, keep and sell to. At some point the CEO can't be in the room for all of them. So the story gets retold without them:


  • Sales tells the version that wins deals this quarter.

  • Marketing writes the version that ranks and converts.

  • Product describes what's on the roadmap.

  • Customer Success explains what the customer actually bought.


Each version is reasonable. Together, they drift.


Last week I wrote about the 25-word test: ask your CEO, Product, Sales and Marketing to describe the company separately, then compare. When teams run it, the gaps rarely come from bad people or bad intentions. They come from a story that was never written down, because it never needed to be. Until suddenly it did.


The founder is often the last to notice. When they tell the story, it still sounds right.


How to scale founder-led marketing: turn one evangelist into a company narrative


The answer isn't to make the founder quieter. Founder-led marketing is an asset, and most companies have too little of it, not too much. The answer is to stop the story living in only one place.


  1. Codify the narrative. Write down what the founder says when they're at their best: the problem, who has it, why now, why you, and what changes for the customer. Not a slogan. A narrative with enough reasoning behind it that someone else can rebuild it in their own words. Then run the 25-word test again. If four teams still come back with four different categories, you're not done.

  2. Equip the people who carry it. Sales, Customer Success and Product tell the story far more often than the CEO does. Give them the narrative, the proof behind it, and the freedom to adapt it for their audience without changing what it means. Then check it the way you'd check a pipeline: listen to calls, read proposals, sit in on onboarding.

  3. Add named voices. If people trust a face more than a team, give them more faces. Let product leads, engineers and customer success managers put their names on content: the release note written by the person who built the feature, the customer story told by the CSM who lived it. It's the B2B version of the "made by" stickers on Lush products, which name the person who made each pot.


One founder's face gets you started. A company of named faces telling the same story is what scales.


Where to start


If you're not sure how far your story has drifted, start with the SaaS Alignment Scorecard. It shows where Product, Sales and Marketing tell the same story, and where they don't.


If the gaps are already obvious, that's the work I do at Ocean Wave Growth: turning a founder's story into a narrative the whole company can tell.


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