Building Marketing for the AI Era | Profound, James Cadwallader

Learn more about Profound at https://www.tryprofound.com/ Profound co-founder and CEO James Cadwallader joins Lightspeed partner Sachin Patel to break down why brand visibility is now a board-level priority in the AI era. As search shifts from blue links to answer engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, and more), James explains how marketers are being disintermediated from consumers and why every company will need to understand how AI models talk about their brand, products, and competitors as this new discovery layer becomes the default. They unpack how Profound became a purpose-built platform to measure and improve brand presence in AI outputs, combining high-volume prompt testing, citation/attribution insights, and a massive panel of real user prompts. The conversation also covers Profound’s expansion from analytics into Agent-powered workflows that help teams generate high-quality, context-rich content at scale with humans in the loop, plus James’s unconventional founder story, the high-agency culture he and co-founder and CTO Dylan Babbs built, and the long-term ambition to become the end-to-end automation platform where modern marketers create, manage, and measure their work. Chapters 0:00 Introduction: The Future of Brand Visibility 1:49 The Gold Business: James's First Entrepreneurial Lesson 7:14 Meeting Dylan and the South Park Commons Origin 13:43 The "Big Short" Moment: Spotting the AI Search Shift 18:03 Profound's Analytics Wedge and the Fortune 500 23:10 Building Agentic Workflows and Content Creation 27:14 Culture, High Agency, and Hiring Young Talent 30:52 Defining a Category and the Jensen Huang Philosophy 32:53 Advice to Young Founders and Final Thoughts ABOUT THE INVESTMENT MEMO PODCAST The Investment Memo is a podcast interview series where founders see their original investment memo for the first time and revisit the deal that started it all. The memo becomes the spine of the episode — sparking honest conversation about early conviction, risk, growth and the relationship that formed between founder and investor. Stay In Touch: Website: www.lsvp.com X: https://x.com/lightspeedvp LinkedIn:   / lightspeed-venture-partners   Instagram:   / lightspeed   The content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily represent the views of Lightspeed. For more details please see lsvp.com/legal. Building Marketing for the AI Era | Profound, James Cadwallader    • Building Marketing for the AI Era | Profou...