Hi. My name is Helen.

I’m a mother, loyal friend, and storyteller. I was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, by a history professor and software engineer. I started my career in advertising and then spent 14 years leading marketing teams at product-first startups, including Facebook, Dropbox, Quora, Plaid, and AngelList. I am an early-stage investor and advise startups on building and scaling their marketing efforts.

The companies I work with all have technical founders, an engineering-first culture, and product levers for growth, allowing them to put off investing in marketing for a long time. These essays started from conversations with founders and investors about building a marketing function from scratch and setting it up to succeed. I hope they are useful to founders who are starting to think about marketing for their startups—whether they’re early-stage and thinking about it proactively (yay!) or very late and need help fixing a marketing headache.