Pick Channels Like an Improviser: Adam Grenier on New Acquisition Bets, Growth CMOs and Burnout

Adam Grenier, formerly head of Growth Marketing and Innovation at Uber, VP of Product and Marketing at Lambda School and VP of Marketing at Masterclass, has done improv for years. He says he chose early on to keep it a hobby rather than a career, and he keeps coming back because it is grounding in a way work and family life are not.

He pulls two rules from it into business. The first is "Yes, and...": in a scene the worst move is to deny your partner, because that stops progress, while accepting and adding keeps the scene alive. The second is the gift of details. Specifics give the other person something to work with, and in marketing they force you to name the exact problem you solve. Saying Masterclass creates content that satisfies deep curiosity the way a biography might is richer than just saying it blends education and entertainment.

Grenier rarely says "Yes, and..." out loud, but he finds it most useful in cross-functional work. At Uber, central teams and city teams often scoped the same problem differently and seemed at odds. Accepting that both views can be true, he says, builds rapport and better solutions, while flat rejection "kills the scene." He recommends improv 101 classes even for people who never want to perform, and suggests making the skill a public team goal so colleagues can call you out.

Lenny frames the topic with the familiar S-curve: every company needs a next layer of growth as the first channel flattens, and so teams chase whatever is new, from Clubhouse to TikTok to newsletter ads. Grenier's framework for exploring emerging channels has three ingredients. The first is overlap between customer needs, company goals and what the channel actually does well.

His example is Spotify. Clubhouse, being audio-first and like live podcast radio, overlaps cleanly with Spotify's audience and goals, which makes it a green light. A photo-driven app has little to do with music, so even if it became enormous it would be a yellow light at best. He sees people ignore this question most often, since they simply ask whether a channel is hot.

He contrasts influencer marketing, whose strength is hyper-targeted contextual reach, with streaming TV or OTT ("over the top" video ads), whose strength is broad reach and video storytelling. A company like Masterclass, with lots of video content, may find OTT a natural fit. He is particularly dismissive of B2B companies that copy consumer fads: "I don't need a Notion Clubhouse channel this week."

The second ingredient is what Grenier calls channel DNA, starting with where the channel is on its own curve. Clubhouse got hot before Facebook got cold, he notes, and many teams chased it even though it had no ads product yet. Committing two quarters to a very early channel means accepting it may be a one-off opportunity, and that its product will keep changing and demand constant effort.

He recalls his time at Zoosk, where companies like Zynga won early growth from Facebook notifications until Facebook pulled the plug. Putting all your energy into one such lever is risky. The less obvious piece of channel DNA, he says, is how the platform monetizes, because a business that supports that strategy gets a real advantage.

At Hotel Tonight he had spent years buying mobile ad inventory and waiting for Facebook's mobile installs to work. When Facebook began exploring mobile ads, he pitched Hotel Tonight as an alpha tester and a case study for non-game categories like travel and leisure, even though it spent far less than gaming players. Lenny adds that this reframes the "behemoth" platform as a partner who wants your success. Grenier warns that platforms chasing brand names like Disney get campaign money, while performance-driven app advertisers keep spending indefinitely.

The third ingredient is your company's own DNA. Being a true first mover is painful: tracking will not work, nothing is programmatic, you may appear next to offensive content, and refunds may never arrive. Grenier asks whether a company has the appetite for that and whether someone can be assigned without distracting from everything else. He also wants to see some volume on Google and Facebook before a company spends energy on a brand-new channel.

Test size follows from the three ingredients. With a small team, one working channel and an early channel, he would put in half of one person. With a killer fit and a 20-person team, three dedicated people might make sense. He rarely recommends the whole team spend several sprints on it, and only adds a sprint or two if there is early magic.

On timing, he would not let a test bleed past a quarter, and a month or less can give some signal, which he calls fishing. Costly experiments, such as a video that takes three weeks and $20,000 to make, deserve a little longer. Experiments should come from a roadmap with a backlog, and success criteria should be defined up front. On Clubhouse that might be growing room size by 10% each time; on TikTok you can track clicks and conversions like any other channel.

Asked about channels to try now, Grenier first points to OTT, which is far more trackable than traditional television while keeping long-form, often unskippable storytelling. He is most intrigued by influencer marketing, which feels to him like early Facebook targeting, though it is tedious and manual. He sees a big opportunity for entrepreneurs building tooling for it, and says Masterclass used Grin, one of roughly half a dozen similar platforms.

VR he compares to mobile before the iPhone 3: interesting if you have a VR app, not yet otherwise. TikTok, he says, has crossed the chasm with a formal ad platform, so the question is how to do it well rather than whether. Podcast ads, which he bought 15 years ago, work best when treated like radio: pick the right program, make it personal and repeat. They are hard to scale, though he finds them especially effective for B2B companies, where each customer is worth more.

Asked what percentage of emerging channels work, Grenier answers roughly 5%. The better odds, he says, are in two kinds of "emerging" channel: old ones that finally became scalable, like podcasting, and existing channels that introduce something new, like Facebook's first 18 months of mobile install ads. Brand-new channels rarely deliver what people hope early on.

Lenny asks about crossing the chasm from a narrow early-adopter audience to a broader one. Grenier says the key point companies miss is how different early adopters are from the broad audience. You need to map what you must see from them to be confident the product will fit beyond them. He now sees it as a red flag in startups that claim product-market fit when their TAM and their product-market fit use different definitions.

Audience changes are not always literal new people. Grenier's current advice to companies asking how to adjust to the economic shift is to assume you no longer have product-market fit, because you had it in a different market. Hopefully you are close and need only a few adjustments. But launching a new channel to fix the problem is the wrong response when your entire customer base has changed.

Grenier has watched several companies hire world-class CMOs who did not last, which pushed him to define a Growth CMO. A traditional CMO treats brand as campaigns and a one-off action, while a Growth CMO follows each brand investment with the next one and brings a fast product-iteration mindset even to brand. Misfit leadership quickly erodes trust and leads companies to rename everything growth or product-led growth. He thinks direct-to-consumer companies may still suit traditional CMOs, but in product-led companies the CMO and product leader must be "married at the hip."

He lists the attributes: being data-driven, including for brand and retention; iterating on everything from landing pages to logos; and experimenting across the whole funnel rather than just trying a new channel. He also argues that the traditional four P's came from an era when product was a separate science group making new cereal flavors. Now, he says, product is the company and marketing is integrated into every part of it.

Almost any strong marketing leader can become one, Grenier says, because the fundamentals of customer psychology have not changed. He likes tracing growth tactics to their origins, such as Coca-Cola's first coupon, which seeded both sides of a marketplace. What changes is the operating model. His advice is to learn agile product development, mentioning a book on agile marketing, Reforge classes and Maven courses, so you can run marketing in sprints and work better with product.

On spotting leaders who will not adapt, Grenier says that below a late-stage company two signals matter most: comfort with chaos and willingness to do work they have not done in 15 years. People from traditional environments can find the pace and unpredictability of startups jarring. Leaders also have to be willing to open Facebook, dig into data or write an email themselves when needed.

He also takes founders through an exercise: every marketer has a T-shaped career, starting from a strength and expanding outward. His own started in mobile, with a first client at Sun Microsystems getting Java developers to build apps for flip phones, and grew into digital, marketing, growth and product. Find a candidate's T and how they plan to cover the rest. When he ran PR at Lambda School, he aimed to reach the "valley of despair" of the Dunning-Kruger effect, learning how bad he was at it so he would hire the right person and listen to them.

Grenier credits his wife, a strong proponent of mental health resources, and his own experience at Uber for his awareness. He was exhausted and down, and he started therapy assuming he was simply working too hard. Instead he found he is the youngest child who craves recognition, and that work was giving him what he lacked elsewhere. He recognized that he could keep working hard but work smarter, on things with impact and with people who respected his work.

There was real burnout too: constant travel, a team of 150 he barely knew, politics with city GMs and no time to mentor. But he realized some of the feelings he had labeled burnout had been present at earlier points in his life, which meant deeper work was needed. He can now tell exhaustion from depression by motivation beyond work. When exhausted he still enjoys an improv class; when depressed he cancels it or leaves immediately.

Over five or six years he went from relying on his therapist and wife to having five or six friends who are transparent with each other, a habit his therapist suggested. His suggestions include therapy, meditation (he cites Waking Up and an app called Aura, in which he is an investor), exercise and diet, and checking employer benefits for therapy coverage. As a sign of burnout in others, he watches for a sharp fall in adaptability and a preference for minimizing challenge, whereas merely exhausted people tend to be re-energized by new opportunities.