Marketing at Anthropic, CMO Advisor, fmr CMO at Twilio, Apollo GraphQL, Algolia. fmr LinkedIn. Father, kitesurfer, swimmer. Writes about Marketing & AI.
Palo Alto, CA
Joined October 2006
- Tweets610
- Following237
- Followers477
- Likes741
Great save by Andrei Lounine the @realmadrid keeper during #BarcaRealMadrid tonight. And Real wins #Elclassico in a VERY disappointing Camp Nou. I always dreamt of going there and was really hoping for a much more vibrant atmosphere. I am used to #psg games at Parc des Princes whose fans propose something much much superior vs a bunch of Barca fans more focused on booing the only Spaniard on the Real team (their world champion, @cucurella3) than cheering for their own team when they were down 1 goal.
The worst part was @FCBarcelona’s stupid rule that you need to assign a ticket you properly bought and paid in full (and more!) to someone with their ID or passport number 24 hours before the game or “too bad we can’t help you, your ticket is lost”. So many angry fans who paid a lot of money and traveled from far away to watch their team and no solution and no empathy. I wanted to go with my daughter who could not get in. Shame on you, supposedly great football club.
This is so right: we will need more brand-focused, truly original CMOs to stand out in the agentic world. "These folks primary have been given tier 2 roles and passed up for CMOs many many times."
My hottest take is that brand marketing is going to be THE major differentiator and one of the most prized assets for a company going forward.
And, I’m not talking about launch videos or pouring money primarily for “aesthetics” simply to pump the valuation. You still need retention before attention.
I’m talking about thinking through what a company stands for and understanding the “vibe” of what’s happening in the market. Being relentless on the long term goal while also thinking through how to showcase the company in the short term. And doing it every week.
Especially if you think agents become the primary user for most products, then to get the attention of a rapidly attention deficit audience (aka humans) you’ll need to stand out consistently in how you present the company.
These folks primary have been given tier 2 roles and passed up for CMOs many many times. I think this will finally invert in the next 10 years where you’ll hire these folks as cofounders or at least give them a big seat at the table.
Normally the design centric CEO tends to be this, but those are rare and you’ll need to learn how to hire for this role. Just like a good product marketer, these are exceptionally rare so you have one hold them close!!
Francois Dufour retweeted
Claude Cowork and chat are merging into one Claude.
Ask a quick question or hand over a report, and Claude takes it from there, even after you close your laptop. If something's unclear, Claude asks—you keep the final say.
Rolling out to Pro and Max over the next few weeks.
Yes, that's exactly what working with Fable 5.1 feels like.
Francois Dufour retweeted
New in Claude Cowork: teach Claude a skill.
Record your screen while you do a task, talk through it as you go, and Claude turns it into a skill it can run again. Find it under Record a skill in the + menu of the Claude desktop app.
Available on Pro, Max, and Team plans.
Francois Dufour retweeted
what are your top claude code + workflows + artifacts use cases?
one of my new favorites is for sourcing candidates:
- tell cc about the role and backgrounds i’m looking for
- ask cc to kick off a dynamic workflow to find 100 candidates, and include linkedin, twitter, blog, podcasts, and one-line pitch for each
- ask cc to make an artifact and email it to me. then, i lock my laptop and head out for the day
- i review the list on the go once cc is done!
Francois Dufour retweeted
There are 100s of ways you can customize Claude Tag for any use case.
Here are 6 common flows that have resonated with our internal users and external design partners:
Francois Dufour retweeted
Excited to share our most powerful new Claude Code feature: dynamic workflows!
Mention "workflow" in a prompt and Claude will dynamically create an orchestration plan that it strictly follows, allowing you to confidently trust that every stage happens in the right order even across 100s of agents.
Francois Dufour retweeted
Karpathy's career moves are the single most accurate map of AI's center of gravity over the last decade.
2015: co-founds OpenAI when the frontier is pure research. 2017: leaves for Tesla when applied neural networks at scale become the hardest unsolved problem. Stays five years building Autopilot. 2023: returns to OpenAI during the GPT-4 sprint. Stays 12 months. 2024: launches Eureka Labs to teach the world how LLMs work.
Now he's at Anthropic.
The "get back to R&D" line tells you something specific. Karpathy spent two years on education. His YouTube lectures reach millions. Eureka Labs had real momentum. He walked away from a growing education business to join a company that went from $87 million in annual revenue to $30 billion in 28 months.
When the person who teaches the world how neural networks work decides the opportunity cost of teaching is too high, the R&D window just entered a phase that won't stay open. He's pricing his own time against the frontier, and the frontier won.
The career pattern is the real signal. Five years at Tesla. Twelve months at OpenAI the second time around. An OpenAI co-founder chose Anthropic. Draw whatever conclusions you want from that sequence.
Francois Dufour retweeted
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
Francois Dufour retweeted
Let's zoom out and think of everything AI has unlocked in the last 10 years.
— We can now generate and edit Hollywood-grade video [Seedance 2], speech [ElevenLabs], music [Suno] and image [Nanobanana, Midjourney]
— We have access to infinite senior software engineering code [5.3 Codex + 4.6 Opus] that is used to create these models too
— We can simulate entirely new interactive worlds [Genie] and use those worlds to teach robots
— We can do entire work tasks in English [Cowork]
— We can solve competition level math and coding problems [many] and even unsolved math problems [AlphaEvolve]
— We can write entire articles that persuade even elite industry veterans [ChatGPT]
— We can ask deep questions or chat with a therapist [ChatGPT]
— We solved the most complex games known to man: Poker, Go, Chess
— We solved protein prediction [AlphaFold]
If after this, someone says "but 95% of AI pilots fail", it's because they're using the wrong a bad product, an old product, or just haters.
The pace of AI is far outpacing the pace at which our institutions are able to keep up, and society 10 years from now is going to look extremely different from today.
Francois Dufour retweeted
Intent is our vision for what comes after the IDE.
AI has changed how we build software. But, it’s also made our workflows messier.
One agent is great. Two work. Past that, things fall apart fast. Prompts go stale, context lives everywhere, and you end up spending more time on the tedious work of orchestrating agents.
The bottleneck isn’t writing code anymore. It’s keeping the agents aligned.
That’s why we built Intent.
Francois Dufour retweeted
OpenAI aren't talking about it yet, but it turns out they've adopted Anthropic's brilliant "skills" mechanism in a big way
Skills are now live in both ChatGPT and their Codex CLI tool, I wrote up some detailed notes on how they work so far here: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/1…
Want to learn or showcase cool AI workflows for Product Marketing?
@londonjames and I are hosting an invitation-only AI Workflow Fest next week.
We want to see advanced AI workflows or agents that make you faster, sharper, more strategic, or more creative.
👉 Submit your workflow through our form - forms.gle/diXK1sNGDAwySbrF8.
We'll select ~6 of the most original or advanced submissions.
Their authors will be invited to present live on Zoom, Thu, Dec 18, 12 pm PT.
The three best workflows will win an annual subscription to Augment Code.
Submission Deadline: Sat, Dec 13, EOD.
Want to join that "Workflow Fest" session without submitting a workflow?
Drop a comment sharing what workflow would be most helpful to you. That will help us select winners (know that we will cap attendees at ~50).
All attendees will get the recording.
PS: Work at a company that wants to donate prizes to our best entries? Pls DM me.
That’s a tough reality for many SaaS startups these days.
you raised $8M at a $40M valuation
you ground it out for 4 years and got to $2M ARR while burning money or breakeven at bast
solid product. customers renew. team is competent
some money still left in the bank
you have revenue. you have profit. you just dont have the growth rate that returns their fund
so now youre stuck
your VC ghosts your emails
why? because youre growing 15% not 150%
cant raise because youre not growing fast enough
cant sell because the pref stack means you walk with nothing
cant shut down because investors wont write it off (they have you marked up in their next fundraising deck)
cant keep grinding because youre burned out and own very little of your company
by normal business standards you succeeded
by venture standards youre a zombie
and theres no infrastructure to help you exit
no broker wants to touch a $2M ARR company with $8M raised
no acquirer wants to deal with a messy cap table
no investor wants to have the honest conversation
hundreds of founders are stuck in this exact position right now
we need new paths for founders to exit companies that work but dont scale