MKT1 Capital is an early-stage fund, led by former marketing leaders Emily Kramer and Kathleen Estreich. We invest $100-$200K in Pre-Seed-Series A B2B startups across industries and help startups build marketing.
We actually help you build out marketing.
We started MKT1 Capital because the investor plus marketer skillset is sorely missing in the ecosystem, yet highly valuable to startups and highly in demand. We are uniquely suited to fill this gap.
We’re marketing leaders, who have taken startups from 0 to 1 & $1M to $100M. We've also advised and invested in over 75 startups.
We make sure you have the right marketing strategy, then help you bring on contractors and hire your first marketing leader.
We help you identify & accelerate marketing advantages (think network effects & category creation).
Once you hire, we serve as mentors to your Head of Marketing and enroll them for free in our course. This is a unique benefit for your marketing hire.
Our fund has lots of marketing leaders as LPs. They're available for questions, referrals, & recommendations too.
Our fund is backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Atacama Ventures; GPs including Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures), Elizabeth Yin (Hustle Fund) Andy McLoughlin (Uncork Capital), Adam Nelson (FirstMark), Jonathan Heiliger (Vertex Ventures), and Avichal Garg (Electric Capital).
Plus founders, operators, and 75+ marketers with leadership experience at B2B Startups including Airtable, Alloy, AngelList, Asana, Atlassian, Box, Carta, Dropbox, Flexport, Glassdoor, Mode, Oyster, Plaid, Ramp, Slack, Splunk, & Wealthfront.
Emily & Kathleen (Managing Partners @ MKT1) discuss angel & fund investing as a marketing operator.
We've worked at some of the most successful SaaS companies over the last 15 years, building marketing and operations teams.
Asana, Carta, Astro (acq. Slack), Ticketfly
Emily has led marketing teams at Seed to Series E startups with $0 to $100M ARR. She built the marketing teams and function from scratch at Asana, Carta, and Astro (acquired by Slack).
While leading Asana's marketing team for 4 years, she launched their first paid product for teams in 2013 and their rebrand in 2015. At Astro, she launched the company and first product, which won Product Hunt's mobile app of the year in 2017; Astro was acquired by Slack a year later. While at Carta, she developed their gender equity gap data studies and launched the Table Stakes initiative in 2019, which has been covered in 50+ top tier publications.
Emily is also a board member at non-profit Empower Work, a text line for people facing challenges in the workplace.
Box, Intercom, Scalyr, Facebook
Kathleen has built and led marketing and operations teams at several high-growth startups including Intercom, Box, Facebook and Scalyr. She has experience on both the marketing and business operations side, bringing a holistic view to help founders grow their early business teams.
While at Scalyr, she helped grow the business and team from seed stage to Series A, owning marketing, recruiting, finance, HR and business operations. At Intercom, she helped the company scale from ~100 employees to over 270. At Box, she ran the Platform Business team, where she oversaw platform marketing, programs and partnership, and started and ran the Box Developer Conference. She spent six years in marketing at Facebook, including roles in corporate communications, platform marketing, and engineering marketing, as the company grew from 15 million to more than a billion users.
Kathleen loves helping founders and companies scale in deliberate ways, focusing on building great products and team environments.
Co-Founder & CEO, Anrok
“MKT1 is my go-to-investor when building out our go-to-market motion. From early advice around setting up our demand-gen engine to directly referring our Head of Marketing, I can trust the MKT1 team to open up their unparalleled marketing network to help us at Anrok.”
Co-Founder & CEO, Pocus
"MKT1 has been one of the most value-add investors because of their expertise on all things go-to-market and the ability to jump in and give strategic AND technical advice."
Co-Founder & CEO, Plain
"There are investors who you don't just want on your cap table, but also want to work with all day, every day as part of your core team. The only negative about MKT1 is that's not possible and you'll wish you’d gotten them on your cap table sooner."
Co-Founder & CEO, Muitny
“The number one area founders struggle with is marketing—from who to hire, to what channels to invest, to how to position their company. Having Emily & Kathleen as investors has been incredibly valuable. They have given us product feedback, helped with company messaging for major launches, and advice on how to get press. Every founder should bring on CMO investors.”
Co-Founder, Assemble
“Emily and Kathleen have lead Marketing at some of the most varied and iconic venture-backed companies across multiple stages of growth.
My cofounder Enrique and I had been trying to get MKT1 to join our cap table for months. They’ve become one of our most valuable and hands-on partners, approaching our marketing challenges with the zeal and commitment as if it were their own company.
Their advice is consistently candid and actionable, and exceptionally hands-on: brainstorming content with us, drafting job descriptions, and regularly serving as a sounding board for strategy. They are also incredibly helpful with hiring, having built up a powerful community of tech marketers.
We've had multiple VP Marketing candidates tell us that the number one perk of working at Assemble would be working with Emily and Kathleen. I have worked with multiple executive hiring firms and VC firms in my career across a number of executive searches. I have never once had that reaction before from so many candidates so consistently."
The best products don’t always win. The best teams don’t always win. And even great founding teams, with great products, in huge markets don’t always win. A great product, team, and market have become table stakes requirements for startups to succeed. Marketing is now the differentiator. But most founders and investors don’t have marketing expertise. That’s where MKT1 Capital comes in.
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