🪐 Marketing Leader: Caleb Bushner

Vice President of Marketing at Unusual Ventures

In This Edition

• Focus on the power of persuasion

• Pursue mission-driven work

• Understand how a company's culture is the code that produces its outputs

About Caleb

Caleb Bushner is Vice President of Marketing at Unusual Ventures, responsible for marketing and community efforts. A veteran of three tech companies and three agencies serving tech companies, Caleb has worked on nearly every stage and facet of marketing in tech. From seed-stage stealth launches to websites and rebrands, IPO communications plans, and developer relations strategies, Caleb has worn the hat of product marketing, brand marketing, demand generation, and everything in between.

He started in martech at Context Optional and Adobe Systems, then went agency-side at Digitas in the Social.Content group doing influencer, social, and integrated marketing for brands ranging from PayPal to Taco Bell. Most recently he created the Digital Strategy division at Mission North, working with early and growth stage startups in cybersecurity, dev tools, and fintech, among others.

Caleb lives in Portland, OR, with his wife and an ever-growing collection of bikes and outdoors gear. In his spare time he reads voraciously and serves on the Board of Advisors of UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum and the Global Advisory Network of World Pulse, the independent, women-led, global social network for social change.

---

What sparked your career path? 

Persuasion! I’ve always been really interested in how to change hearts and minds. I was a reluctant businessperson in that I set out wanting to make the world a little better and I wasn’t sure how business could help me do that. 

But, as I reflected upon how impact happens, I realized that the catalyst is connection and identity. Opinions are changed—and movements formed—when people want change. The most direct way to do that is storytelling and mythmaking. Finance and general business weren’t interesting, but understanding and connecting with HUMANS? That’s interesting. And it’s what is needed to make positive change. That's what marketing is: the craft of persuasion. 

I was introduced to the expert on persuasion, Robert Cialdini, when I was in Business School. He has written many books on the power and science of influence. From his rigorous research, I discovered there’s a science around how to inspire changes and make them stick. Accessing that body of work and community of practice was instrumental in my professional growth. I was able to learn some fundamental principles, but also discover where the frontier is, and where I could make my own contributions to furthering the craft. The future of marketing is still being discovered, and that has made this career path feel dynamic and meaningful.

What is one project you are particularly proud of accomplishing over the years? 

I’ve always wanted to work with good causes and help them have more impact. For me, the most important thing is to do as much as you can to help others.

When I was Chief Strategy Officer at Free Range, a creative brand strategy agency, I worked with many incredible social good and non-profit organizations. One of our clients—Grace Science Foundation was started to cure NGLY1 deficiency, an ultra-rare disease that is terminal. People with NGLY1—and there are only a few dozen in the world—have an extremely short life expectancy and many are severely disabled. 

The founders of Grace Science are a wonderful couple who have a daughter, Grace, with the disease and they’ve dedicated their lives to finding a cure—not just for her and others with NGLY1 deficiency, but for related diseases—both rare and common. In order to arrive at a cure for NGLY1 the researchers are (1) doing work that would prove to be massively relevant for other diseases like cancer; and (2) doing it in a hyper-collaborative, fast-paced way that will hopefully set a new model for medical research and innovation.

My team was hired to create their brand, their website, a promotional video, and a lot of launch campaign materials. We also developed the strategy behind their hybrid business model (for-profit + non-profit) and go-to-market. It was a full-scale project that not only resulted in high-quality work that I was proud of, but it was incredibly impactful in the real world.

I love that project not just because it's literally lifesaving work but also because the founders and I became friends outside of work. It's a relationship that I hope to have for the rest of my life. There are not many times when you can say that you’ve met the person behind an organization’s name — I've met the Grace behind Grace Science. Working with them has been so rewarding. 

Recently, their co-founder, Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi, won the Nobel Prize for her pioneering research in the field. Here’s more about her story and the family’s collaboration with her lab. It’s incredible to get to know such an accomplished woman and to support such an impactful team.  

Can you tell us how you continue to focus on mission-driven work at Unusual Ventures?

We’re a venture firm that’s five years old. Our two founders come from very complementary angles—John Vrionis is an iconic Midas List Investor and Jyoti Bansal has founded three companies, one of which was sold for $3.7 billion dollars. They’re both incredibly passionate about helping founders at the earliest stages of their journey.

John and Jyoti had experienced—and succeeded at—the traditional approach to venture capital and startups. But they also saw how it could be made better. They started from first principles: From the ground up, how can a VC firm truly maximize a startup's chances of success? And if that's possible, how might the firm provide a bigger, positive contribution to the world through its own operations?

Their answer involved approaching VC differently in three key ways. First, by investing early with a very thoughtful focus. Many investors really only start to help once a company is showing signs of success. But Jyoti experienced firsthand that the phase where he needed the most help—the very beginning—was exactly when help was scarcest. They built Unusual to provide the help that others wouldn’t.

Second, the way we provide that support is really unparalleled. Investing in a startup is really just the beginning. We have a team of world-class startup veterans who are embedded full-time inside the portfolio companies. Working alongside the founding team, we help with the initial work of company building—achieving goals across hiring, sales, community, education, marketing, design, and more. Once a startup has the core pieces of a scalable company in place, it's much easier to hire and build upon that foundation. The name Unusual Ventures came into play because someone told us that this is a very unusual approach. It really is. We’re doing things differently and it’s incredibly rewarding work.

Last, by partnering with socially conscious organizations. The organizations whose money we invest are mostly non-profit, so the proceeds from our work are going toward making a difference in the world. I love knowing we're helping causes that are bigger than ourselves.

What skills are most important for someone to succeed in Marketing? 

There’s a great quote from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who said: “Life can only be understood in reverse, but it must be lived forward.” In my career, I've had many moments where I realize that I was only able to accomplish something because I had prior experience. At the time, I didn’t know how it would help me. But, along the way, those skills wound up being instrumental to the next role. 

Specific to marketing, I would emphasis it's three things:

1. Human-Centered Design: HCD (Human-Centered Design) and design thinking drive everything. You can never understand and serve your audience too well.

2. Curiosity: Curiosity doesn’t just power the spirit of inquiry behind design thinking, it also helps with building a marketing engine: (e.g. “Why did X happen from this campaign? How might we change strategies or tactics to maximize X happening?”)

3. EQ: This is the internal skill that is crucial. Marketing, especially in a modern company, must work very well across other teams (sales, product, finance, CS, etc.). But having a wider range of personalities, contexts, and stakeholders can be challenging if you don’t have the EQ to navigate those differences. Conversely, people who exude EQ just encounter a lower coefficient of friction when it comes to getting their ideas and projects out the door.

I could go on, but I think a lot of ink has been spilled on those topics. If it helps, I've got a different list if you ask about the skills for marketing leadership. Every marketer learns the basics of marketing but I often tell mentees to focus on the five skills that are instrumental for any role in a company, especially as you climb the ranks. I recommend these to marketers, especially, because they’re NOT what are traditionally part of a marketer’s education.

There are some skills where you reach a level of proficiency and that's fine—you don't need to get any better, or there is at least a point of diminishing return. But these are the things that you can never get too good at:

1. Empathy: For a leader to successfully lead—rather than manage—people, you must have empathy for them. Frankly, a lot of the principles of HCD are directly relevant for managing people and teams. This is why many leaders of the future will have a design or humanities background. As mentioned earlier, design thinking is a crucial skill for the craft of marketing, but don’t stop there—it’s also important for leading people and teams.

2. Sales: In an organization with competing visions, commitments, and strained resources, selling—internally, not to mention externally—is vital for success. It might feel weird to consider internal persuasion as sales, but frankly, we can all learn a lot from the playbooks of great salespeople even if we're not carrying a quota or selling externally.

3. Change management: At root, any leadership role is about keeping the right things going, and making changes on the rest. This is hard because the only thing people hate more than the status quo is change. So, if your job has some aspect of instituting change effectively, you can never get too good at it because there’s always more to improve.

4. Project management: These last two things are ones that are less about expanding value-add skills; they're more about minimizing loss: reducing wasted time and resources. This is a major thing to learn from lean manufacturing: there are time/resource outlays that go into value-addition (building campaigns, doing thoughtful user research, etc.) and then there are those that are basically waste (meetings that can be emails, projects that aren't strategic, etc.). With good project management skills you can minimize this time waste which allows your team to focus on generating more value.

5. Finance: The more senior you get the more your job is really a finance one: setting, managing, and advocating for a budget. You won't necessarily get promoted for managing a great budget, but screwing up budgets can definitely hinder your career growth or scuttle projects. It’s a mistake for marketing leaders to think that finance is only the finance team’s job. If you’re working to allocate money to the greatest effect, you’re doing finance. And the more you understand the finance org the more effectively you can work with them and the more easily you can make it for them to say yes. The CFO is the second most important person in the company, so this will really set you apart from many other leaders since so few of them regard finance as a priority.

How can collaboration between Marketing and Internal Communications make an impact on an organization?

I see Internal Communications as a subset of Marketing. The obvious answer is that the organization will be more effective—a company's North Star must flow through all that it does, and that's not possible if the internal and external elements aren't aligned.

The things that are expressed externally all originate internally. So a company's culture is the code that produces its outputs. If teams don't understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how it interacts with the rest of the org, its eventual outputs will reflect that confusion or lack of focus.

Sometimes, internal communications teams feel like they have a captive audience. But there’s a difference between getting your audience to read something and getting them to care about and retain it. The purpose of internal communications isn’t to send messages to a company’s employees, it’s to move them. To drive alignment, inspiration, and clarity. It’s tempting for internal comms to lean heavily on long-form and frequent messaging, but external communications has uncovered a host of other methods that seem to work at least as well, so why not put that to practice internally, too?

Candidly, I think that some Internal Communications people miss that. But the best ones know that it’s not about what you say, it’s about what people hear. Internal communications has to be precise and comprehensive, but there’s an art to it. French author Antoine de St. Exupery once said: “if you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”  In other words, I encourage all marketers to think more about how we want to move people rather than what we want to say.

This is what internal comms is all about: really aligning people on the deep fundamental reason that a thing is being done. It aims for their hearts. It’s human-centric. Great marketing excels at Human-Centered Design and understanding the audience, and I think internal communications can learn from this principle. 

How do you continue learning about the field?

The main thing is just tuning my information diet so I'm always listening to new ideas. Not just from my own discipline but from adjacent ones. This is the thing that American Investor Charlie Munger is famous for—lateral thinking. Learn the core principles of one sector and then explore ways in which that might transfer to other categories. 

For instance, I've talked here about lean manufacturing—not a common principle for a marketer to reference, but it's been vital for me as a manager. Likewise, I got interested in Human-Centered Design early in my career and it set me apart because very few MBA marketers understood the core of design thinking.

Fast forward to the future — what do you think communications at work (internal, executive or external) will look like? 

The future of marketing (internal and external) is community. In a hypermediated world, a company's long-term success can't hinge on a hot tech trend or clever Super Bowl ad. Everyone has caught on to the subtle art of persuasion that makes great marketing...so if everyone's marketing is compelling, then nobody's marketing is compelling—they cancel out. It becomes an arms race of spending for influencers and cleverness, and that race is something that nobody can really win—at least not for good.

It requires both understanding your audience and ceding control to them. Tweets won't build a durable relationship with your audience—that's actually still the same as radio ads from the early 20th century: a one-way street. The future is a two-way street. A lot of marketing execs think that "influencer" is a viable strategy for the future, but that's not true either—a brand's limited engagement with an influencer is as shallow as that influencer's very next post for some other product. It's often still a one-way street.

A relationship with your audience should be stitched in, not bolted on. The way to have a durable relationship is actually very old school: just build and sustain a connection on your audience’s terms and be really sincere about it. Understand what they want and make space for them to co-create it with you. That's the future of all this.

For more great thinking on this, I like David Spinks of

David Spinks' Newsletter

who started CMX, which is focused on community. He wrote a great book on this topic, “The Business of Belonging: How To Make Community Your Competitive Advantage.” It’s a practice, not a principle. At the highest level, the challenge is getting the objectives for community right and the tactics of how you breathe life into a community everyday. If you do, you’ve built something that is incredibly hard for competitors to dislodge, and you’ve actually had a positive impact on your audience’s life.

---

Thank you for reading The Switchboard. ☎️ Every interview edition is based on a live interview and personally written by me — Julia Levy. Learn more about why I write. Review the Index of past posts.

If you enjoyed this article, consider sharing it, giving a heart below ❤️, commenting or posting on LinkedIn and Twitter.