Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)

Why this role exists

C-DISC does not need a CMO who only runs Marketing. It needs a company builder who can see the market before it fully exists, help shape the category, and move fluidly across brand, demand, Sales, partnerships, product narrative, market intelligence and company strategy when required. PEN Foundation challenges a deeply established construction habit. The CMO must create the market architecture, playbooks and long-range narrative that let C-DISC scale beyond founder instinct into a repeatable category leader.

Load-bearing contribution

You own the market system, not just the marketing function. Trust remains non-negotiable, but the larger mandate is imagination plus execution: find unconventional paths to adoption, turn them into repeatable playbooks, align them with Sales and product reality, and keep today's decisions consistent with the company C-DISC intends to become over the next five to ten years.

Mandatory credibility bar

This is a direct CMO hire, not a title upgrade. Candidates must demonstrate that they have already operated at meaningful scale and must meet at least one of the credibility routes below. The evidence must come through decisions, outcomes and references, not designation alone.

• Proven experience leading marketing, growth, brand or category creation through a meaningful scale-up, with measurable contribution to revenue, adoption, market share, pipeline or brand growth.

• MBA / PGDM from a Tier-1 Indian or global institution, combined with meaningful marketing, growth, strategy or business leadership experience.

• Substantial work experience in a top-tier company known for strong marketing, growth, product, consumer, industrial or go-to-market execution, with direct ownership of meaningful outcomes.

• Founder, co-founder or early core-team experience in a startup personally helped from early stage to meaningful revenue, customer adoption, fundraising, geographic expansion or team scale.

What you will own

• Own the company-wide market and marketing strategy across category creation, brand, demand generation, product marketing, content, digital channels, public narrative, events and sales enablement.

• Define a three-to-five-year market thesis for how PEN Foundation and future C-DISC products should be understood, adopted, distributed and expanded across segments and geographies.

• Build repeatable playbooks for category creation, market entry, launches, reference-site growth, specifier adoption, strategic partnerships, channel activation, customer education and major campaigns.

• Continuously search for non-obvious growth mechanisms beyond standard marketing channels, then test them cheaply, learn quickly and scale only what earns the right to scale.

• Build the marketing-to-revenue operating model with Sales and Growth: segmentation, target accounts, lead generation, qualification, source attribution, CRM discipline, conversion visibility and demand forecasting.

• Step across functional boundaries when necessary: help shape partnerships, product positioning, customer experience, market intelligence, commercial strategy or founder narrative when the constraint sits there.

• Own brand architecture, messaging hierarchy and the narrative system so customers, investors, partners, employees and institutions hear a coherent company story as C-DISC expands.

• Build and lead the marketing organisation, while creating enough process, delegation and playbooks that the function becomes stronger without depending on the CMO personally.

• Own marketing budgets and capital allocation, deciding where C-DISC should spend, where it should not spend and how each bet will be measured.

• Partner with founders on major strategic choices where market understanding matters, including new segments, product variants, geographies, partnerships and company positioning.

• Protect claim discipline across public communication so ambition never outruns technical or operating reality.

What we need

• 5+ years in marketing, growth, brand, product marketing, category creation or go-to-market leadership, unless an exceptional founder/operator profile demonstrates equivalent scale experience.

• Evidence that you have built, transformed or materially scaled a function, market, category or company, not only managed an established team.

• Out-of-the-box strategic thinking grounded in execution. You should generate non-obvious routes to market, but also know how to test them, kill them or turn them into repeatable systems.

• High adaptability and low territoriality. You can move between board-level strategy, customer conversations, campaign reviews, partnership ideas, product narratives and operating details without losing clarity on ownership.

• A playbook-building mindset. Repeated success should become a system, not remain individual heroics.

• Long-horizon judgment. You can make quarterly trade-offs without losing sight of the brand, category position, organisational capability and market advantage C-DISC is building over years.

• Strong commercial judgment across brand, demand, pricing, sales cycles, product readiness, distribution, capital efficiency and unit economics.

• Experience attracting strong people, building teams, selecting agencies or partners, allocating budgets, setting scorecards and correcting underperformance.

• Exceptional communication and positioning skill, with the confidence to challenge founders and the humility to change your own thesis when evidence disagrees.

Good to have

• Construction, building materials, architecture, infrastructure, industrial products, sustainability, climate tech or deep-tech experience.

• Direct experience creating a new category or repositioning a company where the market first had to be educated before it could be sold.

• Experience designing GTM playbooks that were replicated across teams, cities, regions, channels or product lines.

• Exposure to international market entry, partner-led distribution, government or institutional channels, or multi-geography brand development.

• Experience with fundraising narratives, investor communication, PR or board-level marketing reporting.

What success looks like in the first 90 days

• A clear three-to-five-year category thesis and a practical 12 to 18-month market strategy are aligned with founders, including assumptions that can be tested rather than treated as doctrine.

• Marketing and Sales share one funnel language, source attribution logic, qualification standard and weekly demand review.

• The top customer segments have distinct messaging, proof points, objections, reference assets and campaign routes.

• At least three core playbooks are documented or actively being built from live work, such as segment entry, reference-site growth, campaign-to-sales handoff or strategic co-marketing.

• At least one unconventional growth or category experiment is live with a clear hypothesis, low-cost test design, owner and learning loop.

• The marketing organisation has a clear structure: what should remain in-house, what should be hired next, what can be outsourced and what should not be built yet.

• Founders can see how current marketing and market-building decisions connect to C-DISC's longer-term category, geography and product ambitions.

Non-negotiables in this role

• No market narrative built around an unverified technical or sustainability claim.

• No hiding behind functional boundaries when the company-level constraint requires cross-functional ownership.

• No successful growth mechanism allowed to remain founder intuition or individual heroics. Convert it into a playbook.

• No attachment to the annual plan when field evidence shows the underlying assumption has changed.

• No short-term acquisition or brand win that compromises the long-term category position C-DISC is trying to create.

• No marketing budget justified by prestige, activity, impressions or awards alone. Capital follows constraints, evidence and strategic advantage.

• No founder dependency disguised as executive leadership. Build capability that compounds beyond you.

Culture signals we will look for

• You naturally think across functions and can identify whether the real problem is market, product, sales, distribution, narrative, execution or organisational design.

• You can describe unconventional bets you made before they were obvious, why you made them and what evidence changed your mind.

• You enjoy creating the first playbook, then making yourself unnecessary to running the tenth version of it.

• You can move quickly in ambiguity without becoming chaotic, and create structure without becoming bureaucratic.

• You think in multiple horizons at once: this week's conversion problem, this year's growth engine and the five-year category position.

• You are comfortable playing beyond the formal edges of the CMO role when that is what the company needs, while still creating clear ownership for the organisation behind you.

• You can name the scale decisions you personally made, the trade-offs involved, what failed and what operating system came out of the learning.

Growth path

CMO is already a top functional leadership role. As C-DISC becomes a multi-product and multi-geography company, the mandate can expand beyond Marketing into broader market development, portfolio strategy, global brand, category architecture and company-level growth leadership. The strongest version of this role helps shape not only how C-DISC is marketed, but how the company chooses markets, builds distribution advantages and compounds learning over time.