The first growth hire has been one of the hardest hires for founders to get right.

There are two common paths most founders take, and neither one solves the problem cleanly.

Path 1: Hire a senior growth exec. Someone with pedigree from a Stripe, an Airbnb, or any other famous tech company. The problem is when early-stage founders expect a senior hire to also be scrappy and hands-on. To roll up their sleeves and actually build the inner workings of a growth system.

That's not what senior growth people are for. Their value is strategy, developing growth models, building teams and systems, and so on. Asking them to also do tactical execution isn't unreasonable on its face. It's just asking them to do the wrong job given their actual leverage. Combined with a $300K+ salary, the misalignment gets expensive fast.

Path 2: Hire a junior specialist. Some founders recognize that a senior leader isn't in the cards, so they go a different route. They look for a more affordable junior specialist who can roll up their sleeves and build. The problem here is that the early stages of growth are complicated. Specialists are great when a growth model is already proven and there's a solid foundation to scale. But that's rarely the case at this stage. The moment something changes or stops working, the specialist gets asked to solve a hairy, open-ended growth problem. That's not what they're there to do.

There's a third path, and it's what we prescribe to our founders at Demand Curve. The third path is a hybrid of the two profiles above. Someone senior and strategic enough to handle what a startup at this stage actually needs, and still close enough to the tactics to actually build and execute.

The problem with this third path is that they're hard to find. There just aren't that many of them.

Think about it. For someone to check all these boxes while being only five to eight years into their career, they have to take a pretty specific path to gain the breadth and depth required. Most marketers start their careers inside a single function. A paid specialist becomes a paid manager. A content specialist becomes a content lead. That doesn't produce the cross-functional fluency the role demands.

The rise of the Gen Marketer

In September 2025, Emily Kramer at MKT1 coined a new term: the Gen Marketer. Short for "generalist" plus "generative AI."

Her thesis: a new kind of marketer is emerging. A senior strategist with broad purview across growth and marketing, who uses AI to execute at scale without needing a specialized team beneath them.

Most of the conversations around the Gen Marketer have centered on big-picture questions. Is this the future of marketing teams? Does it replace specialists? Will orgs restructure around it?

Those are speculative questions. Only time will tell how they play out. What we think is being missed is something hiding in plain sight: the emergence of the Gen Marketer is solving a very real and known problem right now.

What we do know: the Gen Marketer is real. This class of operator exists today. Senior growth strategists with broad purview who are genuinely on the cutting edge of AI. Using it to run workflows, build systems, and produce results that used to require a full team.

Read that description again.

A senior strategist with broad purview, leadership chops, and the ability to execute. Sounds a whole lot like the ideal first growth hire, doesn't it?

The Gen Marketer is the third archetype.

Why this actually changes things

If the core problem was that this profile is rare, wouldn't that same problem apply to Gen Marketers? Won't they be just as rare?

In short, yes. This is an emerging profile. The pool is currently small.

But, we have three working hypotheses for why that won't be the case for long.

Senior operators can now lead and execute. The main thing preventing this historically was time and capacity. Being strategic AND hands-on wasn't realistic. AI takes on the most time-consuming execution work, which opens up the capacity for seasoned leaders to do both. There's certainly a subset of senior folks who have no interest in getting tactical, and AI can't change that. But plenty actually love rolling up their sleeves. It just wasn't realistic before now.

More capacity means helping more companies. Leading AND executing for even one company has historically been more than a full-time job. AI changes that math. As it takes on more of the execution work, these folks get real bandwidth back. We may see them start working with multiple companies at once, which further expands access.

The standard career path will change. This one's going to take time, but it might be the most impactful of the three. As AI reduces the burden of tactical execution across the board, more early-career marketers will have real cross-functional exposure from day one. Over time, that creates a much broader pipeline of people growing into the ideal first growth hire profile.

How to act on this today

Let's close out with a few thoughts on how this emerging trend can actually be applied today.

First, we're not going deep here on how to source, vet, and hire for growth. That's a separate piece. If the three-archetype framework above is new to you, Adam Fishman's series on hiring for growth is a great place to go deeper.

Second, we have to be honest: we're still early here. We'd love to point you in the direction of where all these Gen Marketers live, but the bottom line is there aren't that many of them yet. They're emerging. They're out there. We're just early in the curve.

But if you are in the market for your first growth hire, a couple quick tips:

If you have ruled out more senior people, either because you thought they'd be out of budget or because you intuited they wouldn't have the tactical chops, consider opening that door back up. There are senior folks who are ahead of the game on AI and may be more accessible than you'd expect.

Watch out for imposters. True Gen Marketers are the exception, not the rule right now. As with any new marketing trend or title, plenty of marketers will be quick to slap a flashy label on their resumes and LinkedIn profiles. We saw it with growth hackers. We saw it with growth marketers. It'll happen again. Vetting is getting even harder because now there's another layer to hide behind: AI. Come in with healthy skepticism. And again, read Fishman's piece. He covers vetting fundamentals that still apply.

Wrapping up

That's all for this week. If you have any questions about this emerging role or its implications, we'd love to hear from you. Just reply to this email. Otherwise, have a great weekend and see you next week!