Airmeet's CMO Runs a 24-Person Team on Rituals, Not Campaigns

Mark Kilens has run marketing at three companies whose numbers you already know. He was employee 140 at HubSpot and stayed eight and a half years, leaving when it had 3,000 people and $600 million in revenue. He joined Drift at around 200 people and left it at 600, with roughly $100 million in revenue. He is now CMO at Airmeet.

What he brought to the stage is not a growth story. It is the operating system he installs underneath one — and the reason it is worth reading is that almost none of it is about campaigns.

Don’t outsource your team to HR

The first practice Kilens describes is the one he thinks marketing leaders most often skip, on the assumption that somebody else owns it.

HR is great, but you can’t rely just on HR to manage and grow your team. You need to take that into your hands.

Mark Kilens, CMO, Airmeet

Every two weeks he sits down with his six directors and managers — a marketing team of 24 in total — for a session that is not a status meeting. Nothing is recorded. The topics are the ones people are actually stuck on: business strategy, managing up, running one-to-ones.

“Look, you’re trying to work with someone in sales. Talk me through how you’re doing that. What are you struggling with?” The room gives advice; guests from his own network and the CEO’s are brought in to teach. His justification is self-interested and he says so: “I’m dependent on my people.”

Party hats

The second practice has an unserious name and a serious mechanism behind it. It dates to HubSpot Academy in 2017, when the team was around twenty people.

The idea is to identify the people already acting as culture carriers, hand them a budget each quarter, and let them run the social life of the team without the leader in the middle of it. They plan outings. They run quarterly manager awards. “It’s not coming from me top-down. It’s coming organically from the team.”

The annual version at Airmeet is a lake day at his parents’ house in New Hampshire, structured rather than freeform. But the point he makes is about frequency and intent rather than budget: “You don’t have to spend a lot of money. It’s just about the intentionality you put into it.”

Underneath both practices sits a set of values the team wrote together over three months of brainstorms, and which he then uses everywhere a judgement gets made: hiring interviews, performance reviews, feedback, coaching. Airmeet’s company vision, as he states it, is “empowering the world to join together from anywhere”.

Rituals, not supervision

Kilens is explicit that his process layer exists to avoid managing people directly. “Rituals create habits,” he said. “I really try to avoid micromanaging my team.”

• Monday marketing minute — an email and a Slack post to the whole company covering brand, pipeline and team updates across marketing.
• Pipeline review — “pipeline’s the lifeblood of a company.”
• Monthly priorities — two or three per person, set at the start and reviewed against outcomes thirty days later.
• Career growth plans — a template he started using at HubSpot more than ten years ago; twelve or thirteen slides, updated quarterly, owned by the employee.

The career plans are the item he is most insistent about giving away. They cover the competencies being asked for, the skills needed, and a start-stop-continue exercise, and the framing is that the employee runs their own development while the manager supports it.

V2MOM, earlier than you think

The performance layer borrows from Salesforce. V2MOM — vision, values, methods, obstacles, metrics — comes from Marc Benioff; HubSpot ran its own variant called the M-SPOT. Kilens asked the room who knew it and got one hand.

His actual argument is about timing, and it is the sharpest thing he says about scale.

I see too many companies do this too late. We did this probably when we were like 50,000,000 at HubSpot. We did this kind of when we were at 40,000,000 at Drift. We’re doing this now at Airmeet even sooner.

Every person on his team fills one out and tracks progress weekly, laddering their monthly priorities up to his targets, which are pipeline and efficient growth, and from there to the CEO’s.

The same laddering logic drives how he positions the product. He calls them altitudes, and the plane metaphor is the point: “You don’t land a plane from 30,000 feet to the runway within two minutes. It’s not how you land a customer these days either.” Brand, then solution, then product suite, then features, then — the one he calls most important — value positioning, meaning evidence from other customers.

What the numbers say

This URL promises a revenue-growth story, so it is worth being straight about what Airmeet’s own record shows, because the talk does not contain a single company figure.

The GetLatka profile records $28.3 million in revenue for February 2022, alongside a team of 289 and a $35 million Series B. Total funding stands at $50 million. The next revenue figure on file, $47 million for October 2024, is flagged as an estimate rather than a disclosure — and the headcount recorded beside it is 185, down from 319 in July 2023.

A company that shed roughly a third of its people between those two dates is not a story of explosive growth, and Kilens does not claim one. What he was on stage to do was hand over templates, and he closed by pointing at a QR code and telling the room to take them.

The through-line of all of it — the manager sessions, the party hats, the V2MOMs — is a single conviction he returns to while summarising: “Hire for character, train for skill.”

People are everything. You’ve got to give people training and upskilling. Don’t rely just on HR to do that. And you’ve got to make sure they’re fun — there’s team cohesion, psychological safety being born from that mentality of party hats.

Sources — Mark Kilens, CMO of Airmeet, speaking on stage; recording captured 17 March 2023. Revenue, headcount and funding figures from the Airmeet profile on GetLatka, with dates as recorded; the October 2024 revenue figure is carried as an estimate.