Why the Marketer Doesn't Sit on the Board
Galaxies Signal Ed. #06 — Reinvention as a method, marketing's case for a seat at the table, and the Netshoes playbook applied to the AI era.
Renato Mendes was about 30 when the CEO of one of Brazil's largest banks called him in for a meeting about going digital.
It was supposed to last an hour. It ran three.
On the way out, the CEO, a traditional family man in his 60s, shook his hand and said something Renato never forgot.
“Throughout human history, knowledge has always passed from the old to the young. You could be my son. And today, you taught me what that means.”
That's when Renato understood the game had changed. And it hasn't stopped since.
Who he is
Journalist. Marketer. Investor. The method stays the same: break the box.
Former Netshoes. Author of Mude ou Morra, a bestseller with 11,000 copies sold and a 2019 Jabuti Prize finalist. Founding partner of 4 Equity, Latin America's first media-for-equity fund, now backing 21 startups with close to R$150 million invested. Partner at Tab, which built 46 boards in just over a year.
One line from our GLX Cast conversation stuck with me:
“I'm just waiting for the next wall they put in my head, so I can break it.”
Three moments from the episode
01 — The box nobody makes you accept
Renato started as a journalism student in the late '90s. He found marketing by accident, spent years at Netshoes, became a consultant, then an investor. Today he runs a holding company with eight businesses.
From the outside, it looks planned. He says it wasn't.
“If you'd talked to me back in college, I wouldn't have had this clarity. You find your purpose by walking.”
Every shift in his career came from refusing the box other people handed him. A journalist wants to be a marketer? A marketer wants to run a fund? Someone with a small fund now wants a late-stage one? Renato got that question at every turn.
“I'm just waiting for the next wall they put in my head, so I can break it.”
02 — Why the marketer doesn't sit on the board
Renato mentors often, and the same question always comes up: how did you go from marketing to sitting on boards?
His answer is blunt.
“Marketers confused marketing with communication. They shrank the umbrella. It became a story about positioning and branding, important, but far from the core of the business.”
That's why great marketing work rarely earns a board seat. It isn't read as strategic, because it isn't spoken in the language of the people deciding.
Boards talk CAC, LTV, sales cycle, channel allocation, unit economics. If you can't translate what branding does to CAC, you don't get the chair.
“Marketers, study finance. You won't sit in the CFO's seat. But you need to understand sales cycle, CAC, LTV.”
There's a second layer: which company you pick. Renato splits companies into three types, and your career odds shift a lot depending on which one you choose.
“Go work at a Unilever, and marketing has a seat at the table. Go work at a big tech company, and product leads the conversation. If you want to be the marketer who becomes CEO, you have a much better shot at a Unilever than at an Nvidia.”
03 — AI reset the game. Again.
Renato lived through the first big digital shift in 2007, when Netshoes moved 100% online. One moment sums up what set Netshoes apart from the rest of the market.
After an industry event, a construction executive stopped him in the hallway. He'd noticed Netshoes had made a string of changes to its site: shipping, checkout flow, pricing.
“Weren't you worried it would tank?”
Renato got in the cab and realized the gap: the executive assumed Netshoes just had some ideas in a meeting, flipped the whole site overnight, and hoped for the best. In reality, every change ran on 5% of traffic first, often in the Campinas region, Netshoes' test market for reasons Renato still can't explain. Only when the numbers held up did the change roll out to everyone.
“Everything we did was tested to exhaustion, with a method. Growth is almost a way of life.”
Renato sees AI doing to the market today what digital did in 2007. It reset the game. Every professional now picks a side: accept that marketing got left behind, or roll up your sleeves and lead.
Three things stood out from his last trip to the US. Judgment is now the top soft skill, because AI produces similar output from the same input, and whoever can curate wins. Going from zero to one is now easy, but one to 100 isn't, and that gap separates weekend projects from real products. And using an LLM stopped being optional: US funds are now making it a requirement across their portfolio companies.
“AI puts everyone back at zero. You choose: accept that marketing got left behind, or become the one leading it.”
Two trends worth watching
Judgment and the 1-to-100 gap: what will separate who leads from who executes in the AI era.
Trend 01 — Judgment
Same input, similar AI output. Whoever judges well and separates signal from noise gets ahead. AI amplifies judgment, it doesn't replace it.
“If we both give the same input to AI, mine should come out better because of the experience I bring.”
Trend 02 — The 1-to-100 gap
Getting from zero to one with AI is now a weekend project. One to 100 still takes real architecture and craft. That's where most MVPs stall, and where whoever gets through it pulls ahead.
“Zero to one is easy on your own. One to 100 isn't. At some point, you have to professionalize.”
Pull quote
“Marketers, study finance. You won't sit in the CFO's chair. But if you only sit in the communications chair, you'll never be seen as strategic.”
— Renato Mendes, Founding Partner, 4 Equity & Tab · GLX Cast
What this means for Nexus
Renato left one more idea on the table, about buying agents:
“If we're going to use agents to make purchase decisions, they're going to buy for us. So what's the weight of the brand in that?”
That's the next gap in marketing. Once a consumer's agent makes the purchase call, running a campaign and hoping stops being the only test available. Synthetic personas are how brands test before that moment arrives. With Nexus, brands talk to these personas in depth, test creative at scale, and see how people will react before spending a single real dollar.
Schedule a personalized Nexus demo
The million-dollar question
What's the biggest thing you've learned in your life?
Renato has worked five different careers and built a holding company with eight businesses. His answer was direct: take the risk. Nobody's paying that much attention when you fail.
Galaxies Signal Ed. #06 — Reinvention as a method, marketing's case for a seat at the table, and the Netshoes playbook applied to the AI era.