I build pipeline. It's the only marketing metric I've ever really cared about; the rest is decoration. Funnels, frameworks, attribution models, MQL definitions — useful when they help, in the way when they don't. The work I'm interested in is turning strangers into revenue, and after years of doing it I'm pretty sure the only thing that consistently moves the number is shipping.

These days I run the whole stack — content, paid, SEO, events, SDR, ops — through a squad of AI agents I've stitched together over the last year. One per discipline. I conduct. The output looks like a ten-person team and the leverage still surprises me most weeks, but the only reason any of it actually works is that I've done each of those jobs by hand first. You can't point an agent at something you've never built yourself.

I've been the first or founding demand gen hire at four companies in a row — DataHawk (pre-seed, in Paris), Octane (Series A, acquired by Stripe), Arthur AI (Series B), and now Vitesse (Series C, B2B fintech building rails for insurance payments). Same job each time: arrive, pour the foundation, hire the team, hit the number. The mechanics shift at every stage; the work doesn't.

Originally Paris, currently New York, switching languages on calls without noticing. If you're a founder figuring out early demand gen, an operator wrestling with the AI workflow question, or you just want to argue about marketing — find me on LinkedIn or send a note to raphael.menesclou@gmail.com.