20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025

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The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2025

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kieran Flanagan is the CMO at HubSpot, where he’s led the transformation of their growth strategy from SEO-led to multi-channel and AI-powered. Formerly SVP of Marketing, he helped scale HubSpot’s user base to millions and revenue past $2B. Before HubSpot, he drove breakout growth at Marketo and Salesforce. Kieran is one of the most respected voices in SaaS marketing and a pioneer in growth-driven content strategy.

Agenda:

00:03 – The Death of Growth Teams? Kieran's Wild Prediction

06:44 – AI Innovation Pods: The New Org Structure for Startups

10:18 – Email Personalization That Tripled Conversions

13:21 – From Software Budget to Labor Budget: The Shift is Happening

16:35 – The Big Lie: Why Autonomous Agents Still Suck

19:24 – The Secret Sauce Behind HubSpot’s Email AI Stack

21:44 – Segment-Based Marketing Is Dead. Enter Micro Audiences.

24:15 – Content Collapse: Why Google Organic Is Getting Torched

30:52 – The Future of AI SEO: 1 Product, 100 Pages, Infinite Prompts

33:16 – Memory = Moat: Why ChatGPT Is Becoming Unbeatable

35:46 – Prompt Engineering is the New Coding: Here's How to Win

41:03 – The Death of the Middle Manager Marketer

46:17 – OpenAI vs. Anthropic: Kieran’s $400M Bet

48:00 – Europe Is Falling Behind: The Harsh Truth on Regulation

52:39 – CMO Playbook 2025: Micro-Audiences, Creator-Led, AI at Scale

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and this is a very special episode of 20 Growth,
0:05.0	as we welcome back one of my favorite growth minds. So for those that don't know, 20 Growth
0:09.8	is the monthly show where we sit down with the best growth leaders to unpack how they think,
0:15.7	learn, build the best growth organizations today. And rejoining me in the hot seat is Kieran Flanagan.
0:22.0	As I said, I think he's one of the greatest minds in growth today. He runs all things growth
0:26.5	and especially AI implementation at HubSpot. Today was a very natural free-flowing conversation
0:32.2	that originated from one of his LinkedIn posts, which I loved. And I so appreciate him
0:36.8	rejoining me in the hot seat
0:38.1	today to really delve into how AI changes the growth landscape as we know it.
0:43.7	But before we dive into the show today, Secureframe empowers businesses to build trust with
0:48.1	customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation.
0:53.4	Thousands of fast-growing businesses,
0:55.0	including NASDA, AngelList, Doodle and Coder, trust Secureframe to expedite their compliance journey
1:00.7	for global security and privacy standards, such as SOC2 and ISO-27,1, CMMC, NIST standards, and more.
1:09.3	Backed by top-tier investors and corporations like Google and
1:12.3	Kleiner Perkins, the company is among Forbes's list of the top 100 startup employers for 2024,
1:18.2	G2's best software awards for higher satisfaction products, and a recipient of the 2024 Cybersecurity
1:24.3	Excellence Awards, something I definitely never got in school myself.
1:28.1	Learn more today at Secureframe.com.
1:30.7	Now, let's switch gears to the future of mobile and how one company is turning your screen
1:35.3	into real returns.
1:36.6	We spend nearly half our waking hours glued to our phones, upwards of 50 hours every week.
	...

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