How I Closed My Startup and Interviewed Into a CMO Seat: Fireside Chat With Rachael Classi, VP at Life is Good
A fireside chat on Tuesday, September 22 at 12 PM ET. Birdie Firesides, episode two. Bring your lunch. 🥗
Rachael Classi has run global women's brand and product at Specialized Bicycles, taken a company through Techstars, gone from director to VP in sixteen months at Teamworks while owning go-to-market for the NHL, MLB and the NFL, and served as chief marketing officer for Decathlon in the US. She is now VP of marketing at Life is Good. She’s taken the C-suite title and the VP one on purpose, and she'll tell you how she made each call.
Rachael also spent four years building a company of her own, Tiny Earth Toys, and decided to close it in August 2024. A few months later she was a CMO. She got there the ordinary, tough way: a search, recruiters, rounds of interviews, all while winding down the company she’d built.
Most of us only see the version of a career that fits on a LinkedIn profile. The title, the years, the clean line drawn between them. What we don’t see is the part where a woman ends something she built, says so out loud in an interview room, and goes and gets the next job anyway. That’s the part Rachael is telling us.
Soumya and Kelsey are asking her the questions you can’t ask at work:
How did she know it was time to close Tiny Earth, and how did she say it out loud the first time?
What did she actually say to interviewers about a company that had just ended, and what happened in the room when she said it?
How do you run a real job search while you’re still winding something down?
How do you take a role that reads as a step down on paper and have it not be one?
What actually moved her from director to VP in sixteen months?
You’ll leave with:
An honest picture of what happens after something you built ends, from a woman who is thriving on the other side of it.
Language for talking about the uneven parts of your own path without apologizing for them, and a reason to stop editing them out.
A realistic sense of what the next search looks like, since hers ran on interviews and recruiters like everyone else’s.
Rachael’s real answer to how she decides what comes next, including what she has said no to.
No slides. No talking points. Soumya and Kelsey ask, Rachael answers, and the last twenty minutes belong to you. Bring the question you’d only ask a friend.
This one is free, and open to everyone.