Founder-led Marketing: Think like a CMO - Sonny Mayugba, EIR, Spero Ventures

​About the Session:

​As a founder, thinking like a CMO involves the following:

• ​Grounding your company in a core mission & purpose

• ​Being the strongest advocate for your customer

• ​Defining your brand

• ​Setting your culture

• ​Driving growth

• ​Experimenting across various channels

• ​Driving acquisition & retention

• ​Understanding unit economics

• ​Hitting your P&L

​Sonny will cover the must-have marketing fundamentals that will help founders grow their startups from seed to Series A and beyond.

​About Sonny: Sonny Mayugba is an Entrepreneur In Residence at Spero Ventures. On the road to success, Sonny started with a futon mattress, a rice cooker, and a few entrepreneurial scribbles on a cocktail napkin. Some years later, he had the surreal experience of ringing his company’s NASDAQ opening bell in Times Square. A true Napkin-to-Nasdaq story!

​A serial entrepreneur, Sonny first got hooked on startups by launching Heckler, a print/digital magazine that he sold to Times Mirror when he was 25. After that, there was no turning back from the startup world. Sonny went on to start Requested, a mobile app for restaurants & bars that was in the first cohort of Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH accelerator. Requested eventually merged with Waitr, a restaurant delivery app, where Sonny became the founding CMO. In charge of customer acquisition, brand identity, and revenue stewardship, Sonny helped grow Waitr Holdings to $800M annual revenue, expanded into 700 cities, and rang the Nasdaq opening bell when the company went public in 2018. Outside of his EIR role at Spero, Sonny is an angel investor and a board advisor to startups. He also makes time for his lifelong passions for competitive table tennis, skateboarding, snowboarding, and music.