Olga Andrienko spent 12 years helping build Semrush from $5M in revenue to IPO. She led social, brand, global marketing, and eventually operations at scale. Now she’s joining a pre-seed startup as CMO to build everything from scratch:
- A new product category (AI-driven corporate learning)
- A founder brand
- An employee advocacy system
- A modern AI-powered marketing engine
We discuss:
Why Olga left Semrush after 12 years
Why enterprise marketers feel stuck right now and how AI restrictions slow innovation
What marketers should actually do in a scary job market to stay employable
The #1 skill marketers need in 2025: experimenting with AI + no-code on their own
The departments where AI creates the biggest leverage (hint: not marketing)
How Semrush cut reporting time from 10 hours down to hours using automation
The automated workflows Semrush shipped: SOV tracking, reporting, content QA
The dream content engine Olga couldn’t build and why AI quality still isn’t there
How AI will reshape marketing orgs and which roles will (and won’t) survive
Why social media managers now have more strategic leverage than ever
Why brand pages on LinkedIn are basically dead and how to fix it
How Semrush scaled employee advocacy to 10M+ impressions a year
Employee advocacy vs executive thought leadership: the real difference
The exact system Olga is using to build her founder’s brand at Foxtory
How she scrapes top founders, analyzes formats, and recreates winning post types
The outbound → founder-brand → content loop that drives traction
Why a founder brand is a multi-year compounding asset and not a 3-month project
Perfect For You If
You’re a founder building your personal brand from zero
You lead marketing inside a startup and need leverage fast
You work in enterprise and feel slowed down by approvals, rules & legacy systems
You want to build an employee advocacy program that actually scales
You want to understand how top marketers think about org design & team structure
You want a behind-the-scenes look at how a former Semrush exec builds in public
Connect with Olga:
Olga’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olgandrienko/
Foxtery: https://www.foxtery.com/
Connect with me:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/
Website: https://www.project33.io/
Chapters
00:00 — Why Olga left Semrush after 12 years
02:00 — The gap in her career: building from zero
03:30 — Solo vs team: why she chose a startup
06:00 — How AI restrictions slow down enterprise marketers
08:30 — What marketers should do when the job market feels unsafe
10:50 — The biggest AI opportunities inside large organizations
13:00 — Semrush’s 10h → 2h reporting automation
14:30 — How they automated share-of-voice tracking
16:45 — The content engine Olga couldn’t get approved
20:15 — How AI changes team structure & role definitions
22:00 — Why social media managers now have disproportionate leverage
24:00 — Why most brand pages are a graveyard
27:00 — How Sem rush scaled employee advocacy to 10M+ impressions
30:30 — Advocacy vs executive thought leadership
33:00 — Why Olga never touched executive accounts at Semrush
36:00 — How she’s activating her new founder’s brand at Foxtery
38:30 — Scraping top creators and rebuilding winning formats
44:00 — Why she refuses AI-generated infographics
47:30 — How she’s measuring success before product launch
49:40 — Founder brand as a long-term compounding asset
51:00 — What’s next for Foxtery
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