A job description showed up in a CMO group I’m in a few weeks ago. The company was somewhere between $500K and $1M in ARR. The goal was $20M by next year. They were hiring eight new AEs to get there, and now they wanted a marketing leader to fill the pipeline.

The first few replies were what you’d expect. Somebody looked at Harvey and Lovable and decided they could do that too. Was there any real math used in that decision. Likely not!

Then someone pointed out that a handful of companies really are doing runs like that right now. And the thread just kind of ended there, unresolved.

Jason Cardillo couldn’t let it go. So he went down the rabbit hole and studied 60+ companies that actually hit hypergrowth, looking for patterns. He came on Pipe Dreams this week to walk through what he found.

Remember “triple, triple, double, double, double”? That used to be the gold standard. Jason says the version going around now is quadruple, quadruple, triple, triple, triple.

Here’s the thing though. ChartMogul looked at a much bigger set of companies and found that fewer than 1% in the AI era have hit what we’d call hypergrowth. Most companies are doubling, or growing 50%, and plenty of them are doing just fine. They make money for their investors, their founders and their employees.

The headlines only get written about the outliers. And a lot of growth targets get set by looking at headlines instead of baselines.

So when you’re handed a number, Jason’s first question is simple, which population did it come from? Was it built from the bottom up, or did someone see a TechCrunch article and wish it were them?

This was the part that stuck with me most. Before you can judge the number, you need to know which job you’re actually being hired to do.

Finding product market fit (PMF) and scaling it are completely different jobs, and they usually need different marketers. Jason was honest that he’s not the person you bring in while you’re still searching for fit.

His checks for whether a company actually has it:

This is the one most aggressive plans miss.

If each seller brings in $10M and you want to get to $100M, and the only way to get there is hiring nine more sellers, that’s not a hypergrowth company. Sellers take time to ramp. On a short, aggressive timeline, more headcount can’t be the whole answer.

Real hypergrowth needs something that lets revenue grow faster than the team selling it. Sometimes that’s usage, like Cursor coming in at a low price point and growing the bill without another rep. Sometimes it’s a growth loop, like Gamma’s branding showing up on every presentation people shared.

And it works in enterprise too. Harvey didn’t launch until it had signed one of the biggest law firms in the world, then pointed to them, then added Accenture. When the 800-pound gorilla signs up for a brand-new product, the industry press writes about it for you. No startup budget can buy that.

Jason’s favorite way to test a company during interviews:

“Let’s say we’re 90 days in, and the data says pipeline isn’t actually our problem. It’s activation, or onboarding, or retention. What do we do as an exec team?”

If the answer is “find more pipeline anyway,” that’s a red flag. That company will always push marketing to grab whatever it can, and it’ll blame marketing first when the number misses.

If the answer is “we’d sit down and figure out where to invest and where to slow down,” that’s a green flag.

His other advice: don’t argue with the number. Work out what has to be true. What’s the ACV? How many deals does that take? How long do sellers take to ramp? Is there anything that lets revenue grow faster than headcount? You’ll learn more from the math than from the debate, and you’ll come across as the kind of leader people want to hire.

I’ve walked into a few of these.

Ambition is fine. If you want to beat the big incumbents, you have to be a little bit in fantasy. That’s part of the job.

But there’s a difference between ambitious and impossible. When sales cycles run eight to twelve months, you have half the pipeline you need, and it’s already June, that takes bending the laws of physics, and I prefer to leave that to the scientists.

What gets me is what happens next. When the math was never there, the miss lands on marketing, the leadership team loses credibility, and good marketers get chewed up by targets nobody could have hit. I’ve heard that same story from more people in this community in the last month than I’d like to admit.

Jason said something about the interview process that I keep coming back to: “If it’s hard in the interview process, what’s it going to be like when there’s only nine months of runway left?”

And sometimes you take the job anyway. You’ve got a mortgage, and nobody should judge you for that. Just go in with your eyes open. Know the hammer might come, and use the time to build something concrete you can point to next time such as a real ICP, a pipeline engine, a clear story.

🎧 Jason goes through all the red and green flags to look for before taking the job in the full episode.

Watch the full episode →

You can also find his hypergrowth research at jasoncardillo.com.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about AI replacing the bottom rung. Then my son switched his major from marketing to finance, and I posted about it on LinkedIn. Over 20K people saw it and more than 100 marketers weighed in.

My favorite idea came from Ólöf Kristjánsdóttir inside the MarketingHQ community. If juniors can’t learn by doing the grunt work anymore, they’ll need to learn from people who did. She suggested a mentorship program.

So I’m thinking about building one. Reply to this email and tell me if you’d want to be a mentor, a mentee, or both.

Jason’s research started with a question he couldn’t stop thinking about, and he’s now one of the most active members of the MarketingHQ community.

That’s what it’s for: early-stage B2B marketers comparing notes on the stuff they’re actually dealing with. We’re over 100 in-house marketers now, with a private Leaders Circle for heads of marketing, a jobs list every Friday and a Boston group.

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