For two and a half years I ran go to market strategy across more than fifteen portfolio companies at a venture studio. No direct authority. No dedicated budget. Fifteen founders who each believed, correctly from where they sat, that theirs was the most important company on the roster.
Most of what I learned was unlearning. Things that work when you own one company's marketing stop working the moment you cannot mandate anything, and the failures were instructive in a way that success at a single company never was.
The first lesson is that systems beat programs. My instinct early on was to run campaigns for portfolio companies. It did not scale past about three, and worse, it made me the bottleneck for everything I touched. What worked instead was building reusable machinery. A positioning process, a paid account structure, a reporting layer, all documented well enough that a founder with no marketing background could run it without me in the room. Less satisfying to build. Vastly more leverage.
Trust with the founder was the only variable that reliably predicted execution speed. Not budget, not team size, not stage.
The second lesson is that narrative beats spend at early stage, and it is not close. Companies in the portfolio with a sharp story and a small budget consistently outran companies with a muddy story and real money. Paid media does not fix a positioning problem, it purchases more exposure for it. Watching that pattern repeat across fifteen companies in parallel was the most persuasive evidence I have ever had for something I already believed.
The third lesson is the one I use most now. Without authority, you have to win the argument every single time, which forces you to actually have one. I could not tell anyone to do anything. I could only show them why, with evidence, in language that fit their situation. That constraint made me better at the job than any role where I had a team and could simply direct it. I have not run marketing the same way since.
The honest caveat. Portfolio work makes you broad, and broad has a cost. You are never in one problem long enough to see the two year consequences of your own decisions, and that is where a lot of the real learning in marketing lives. It is one of the reasons I went back to operating.