Michael J. Miraflor is a bit of an advertising connoisseur. From the looks of his X account, he’s constantly checking the vibes, offering takes honed from nearly two decades in agency life, where he led strategy for brands like Puma, Gucci, and H&M at Publicis and led projects for LVMH and Google at MediaLink.
Today, he’s chief brand officer of Hannah Grey, a VC firm where he says he sometimes “slots in as a short-term, interim CMO” for some of the firm’s portfolio companies. Marketing Brew asked Miraflor about his gig differs from agency life, and how he offers founders ways to troubleshoot marketing challenges.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
How do you explain your job to your parents?
I usually start with explaining what venture capital is—I didn’t grow up in a household where finances were talked about out in the open...I’m someone at a firm that invests in founders who are trying to get their businesses off the ground to one day be household-name brands.
What does a chief brand officer do within a VC firm? I don’t think of marketing when I think of venture capital.
It is a very unique title for VC, but I think it speaks to our unique value prop as a fund.
I’m equally obsessed with brands and creativity as I am with technology and innovation…not only [is Hannah Grey] capable of identifying founders with a lot of potential, but we can actually help them, both strategically and tactically, with their go-to-market…It boils down to helping portfolio companies and their founders with everything that they need to go from zero to one with all things marketing…It doesn’t matter what category, every brand needs a website, they need to do some very fundamental things like SEO, SEM…In some ways, for some of our portfolio companies, I sort of slot in as a short-term, interim CMO, just to get the house in order…A great example: We have a consumer brand that we invested in called Stand. They are a footwear company that is designed for people who have jobs where they need to spend a lot of time on their feet…They used to be called Gales, and they used to be narrowly targeted towards healthcare professionals and nurses. I assisted with helping to kind of reposition from Gales into Stand and also helped them find who eventually became their chief design officer…There aren’t a lot of people who cross over from the brand and agency world into venture capital, but it’s my opinion that more people should consider it. There just isn’t a very clear pathway to make that transition, but people with similar titles or similar experiences are starting to find each other.
How is VC life different from agency life?
The big fundamental thing that I sometimes still need to pause and wrap my head around is that when you’re on the agency side, there are a lot of deadlines that happen in rapid succession, fairly quickly…In VC, especially in the early stage we invest in—pre-seed and seed—we know that a breakout hit won’t happen for five to 10 years. It’s going to take that amount of time for even the most talented of founders to grow their company to a point where they can either be acquired or go public, which are the ultimate best-case scenarios, and that just takes time.
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We’re taking bets that these founders will be successful in the long term, which is a totally different time horizon than the agency world. That’s the biggest difference, I would say.
What do you spend most of your time working on? When you’re talking to these founders, what are the challenges you’re helping them troubleshoot?
Some [founders] are very marketing savvy, or they have really good instincts. Conversations I have with them are mostly to validate what their intentions might have been, and just put some structure around it and introduce them to people to help execute what their vision is.
There are other founders that are quite technical and really need an education to bring them up to speed, but ultimately, my goal is to understand what their problems, challenges, and opportunities are, and build the perfect brief for them to find the help that they need to grow their companies.
You can be a founder and you might have the best intentions with marketing, but you’re juggling like 15 other things, right? So you might get around to it when you have time, and you probably don’t have financing to hire a senior marketer, or that probably wouldn’t be worth spending your capital on; that’s where I slot in.
What is a mistake you see from a lot of these early-stage companies in terms of branding and advertising?
Let’s use B2B for example…SaaS companies, it took them a while to understand that even though their customer is B2B…you will exist in the world, and people will form opinions on what you stand for and how they feel about you upon first impression, based on how much you pay attention or care about your branding and positioning.
What else should I ask you about your gig?
There should be more people that consider crossing over to venture or platform roles within VC, whether it be like chief brand officer, like what I do, or, you know, to be like growth marketers or people in PR. I feel like there’s a need for it.
Founders appreciate it, and, you know, just the cold reality of the agency world is that at a certain point or age, you kind of get kicked out, right? And where do you go? Where’s a good landing spot? I think VC should be an option.
When I was on the agency side, I went to one retirement party, because everyone else had left prior to that, unceremoniously, because that’s just the way the industry works.