Figma's CMO on safe marketing being risky

First Round's Executive Function podcast doesn't always produce something worth flagging. This episode with Sheila Joglekar Vashee, Figma's CMO, does. The framework she uses to think about brand risk is directly transferable to operators building visibility at a fraction of Figma's scale.

"Ubiquity is the opposite of cool"

Vashee picked up this line from Urban Outfitters' CEO during her retail years. Gap in the 1990s is her case study. Gap was everywhere, and then it wasn't interesting. The distribution won. The brand lost.

She points to Harley Davidson and Apple as the counterexamples -- companies that scaled to mass reach without becoming generic. What those brands held onto is harder to name than it is to recognize. She calls it "the challenger spirit." The sense that the brand still has something to prove, even when it clearly doesn't need to.

For Figma, the challenge is real. The product is widely used. It's in design teams at companies of every size. Widespread usage and beloved brand are not the same thing, and Vashee knows it.

The pressure this creates on marketing is specific: growth can't come from ubiquity plays. Vashee is explicitly wary of the kind of growth tactics that win impressions at the cost of perception.

The spammy TikTok ad problem

Her framing here is worth quoting directly: "Think about any spammy ad you've seen on TikTok. That doesn't improve brand perception, but it gets your attention in the moment and it might make you click. Over time, that's detrimental to a company's brand, even if it's effective as a local maximum for that channel."

Local maximum is the phrase to hold. A local maximum in paid social -- high CTR, decent CPL, good short-run numbers -- can coexist with a long-run brand penalty that doesn't show up in the dashboard for 18 months. By the time it shows, the brand association is set.

For operators building on LinkedIn, the equivalent pattern is the engagement-bait comment. It gets a reaction in the moment. It might pull a follow. Over time, if that's all you're doing, the signal you send to the people in those comment sections is that you're optimizing for attention, not contributing to the conversation. Those are different things, and audiences eventually tell them apart.

Marketing as a portfolio

The framework Vashee uses to hold this tension: treat marketing spend like an investment portfolio, not a single bet.

Maintenance bets are the predictable plays that keep revenue coming in and the funnel moving. They're not exciting. They're not supposed to be. They exist so the business doesn't miss its numbers while the creative bets are running.

Moonshots are the ideas that "always seem crazy when you look at them individually." The ones that, if you had to defend each one in isolation in a budget meeting, would probably get cut. In a portfolio, you can hold them. Because if one fails, the maintenance layer absorbs it.

This is a different mental model than most operators use. The default is to ask "will this work?" about each tactic in isolation. The portfolio model asks "what mix of bets, across what range of certainty, gives us the best chance of a step-change outcome without torching the business if the moonshots miss?"

The practical consequence: she runs campaigns she expects to fail. Not casually, and not as an excuse for lazy thinking, but as a deliberate structural choice. The creative breakthrough doesn't come from batting 1.000. It comes from taking enough swings that one of them connects in a way the cautious version never would.

Why AI needs optimistic stories

The third thread in the episode is less tactical but worth noting. Vashee thinks the AI moment is being underserved by pessimistic narratives.

Her argument: every major platform shift -- the internet, mobile, social -- created enormous opportunities. The coverage of those moments was not uniformly positive at the time, but the builders found the optimistic frame and ran with it. AI is getting more fear-of-displacement coverage than it is getting joy-of-building coverage.

She sees room for brands, including Figma, to recapture the energy of the early-builder moment. The joy of making things, which is pretty close to what Figma's product enables, is a more durable positioning than "don't get left behind."

For operators whose content strategy leans heavily on the urgency angle -- the "AI is coming for your job" type of hook -- this is worth sitting with. Urgency gets clicks. Optimism about what's buildable now is a harder frame to establish and a stickier one once it's there. The creators we track who build real inbound over time tend to sit in that second category. Not because they ignore risks, but because their audience shows up to learn what's possible, not to be warned about what isn't.

What this means for operators at a smaller scale

Vashee is running marketing for a company heading toward a public market. The absolute numbers don't translate. The logic does.

The portfolio model applies whether you have $50,000 in marketing budget or $50 million. Operators building visibility through LinkedIn engagement are, in most cases, running a maintenance-only strategy: showing up consistently, commenting on the same influencers, repeating the format that worked last month. That's fine as a maintenance layer. The operators who break through tend to have one or two creative bets running in parallel -- a format they haven't tried, an audience they haven't engaged with, a perspective they've been sitting on because it's too contrarian to feel safe.

The portfolio frame makes the creative bet feel less reckless. You're not gambling the business on one campaign. You're allocating a slice of capacity to it, running it alongside the reliable layer, and learning from whatever happens.

On the ubiquity point: the LinkedIn equivalent of "ubiquity kills cool" is the comment that sounds like everyone else's comment. If your comment on a popular post reads the same as the 15 comments above it, you've bought yourself a local maximum -- maybe a few profile views -- at the cost of actual signal. The operators who build real inbound from LinkedIn engagement are not the ones posting most frequently, and they're not the ones saying the safest thing. They're the ones with a point of view that takes a small risk.

That's Vashee's argument about marketing at Figma. It scales down farther than she probably intended.

You can listen to the full episode on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.