WHOOP's CMO Hire Shows Why Most Startups Hire Marketing Chiefs Too Early

By Grace Kim

In July, WHOOP hired Dirk-Jan van Hameren, Nike's former chief marketing officer, to run marketing at the wearable-tech company. On paper, it looked like a typical senior marketing hire. In practice, van Hameren walked into a company that had just closed a $575 million funding round at a $10.1 billion valuation, crossed 3 million members and was already cash-flow positive.

He didn't build a marketing function. He inherited one: a 65-person team already in place, reporting directly to him from day one.

That's the part founders miss when they look at a hire like this and think, "We're ready for that, too." An Entrepreneur contributor who has spent years placing marketing talent inside growth-stage companies says the most common mistake is making a senior hire before the infrastructure exists to support it — and expecting the leader to produce results off a strategy that doesn't exist yet.

What are the signs a company isn't ready?

Three signals usually mean the infrastructure isn't there for a VP or CMO, even if the ambition is:

• There's no repeatable way leads or customers come in yet.
• The marketing budget depends on whoever's cheapest that quarter rather than what's working.
• No one on the team could tell you which channel actually drives revenue.

The contributor recounts one founder who got excited about a strong résumé, made the hire, then wondered six months in why nothing had changed. The new leader spent most of their time on hands-on execution instead of building a team or a strategy, while the rest of the leadership team kept expecting immediate growth results.

"That expectation was the real problem," the contributor writes.

A senior marketing leader's first few months should go toward diagnosing what's actually working, not producing results from a strategy that doesn't exist yet. Skip that step, and any growth won't hold. In most cases, the company would have been better served by a strong director-level marketing leader first, then an executive once complexity and scale justified the title.

A director-level hire costs less, carries lower expectations and is often more comfortable doing the hands-on work the company actually needs. Nothing about it is a step down.

How should founders set up a new hire?

A senior marketing leader needs four things in the first 90 days: clear business goals, real decision-making authority, access to data, and alignment with the founder on priorities. They also need context — what's been tried before, what's working now and where the company wants to go. Without it, a new hire spends their first month rediscovering things the company already learned the hard way, such as channels that never converted or messaging that fell flat with the sales team.

Founders fall short here constantly, the contributor writes: changing priorities every few weeks, withholding real authority while still expecting ownership, or demanding results before the leader has built a strategy grounded in the company's actual data.

The misalignment is measurable. A 2025 Gartner survey of CEOs and CFOs found only 34% see eye-to-eye with their CMO on marketing's role in supporting growth — exactly the kind of disconnect that turns a strong hire into a six-month disappointment.

Can fractional leadership close the gap?

Fractional leadership makes sense when a company needs senior-level strategy and expertise but isn't ready for the cost, scope or workload of a full-time executive — particularly during growth or transition, or when the marketing function itself still needs to be built.

Alina Vandenberghe, co-founder and co-CEO of Chili Piper, used this approach after running marketing herself, hitting her numbers but exhausting the model. Rather than hiring a full-time CMO right away, she brought on a fractional marketing executive to test what skills and attributes her permanent hire actually needed. A short, defined engagement — three to six months, with specific goals attached — gives the same clarity.

Real work gets done, and you learn what the role requires before committing to a salary and a title. Vandenberghe landed on a full-time VP of marketing once that was clear.

Van Hameren's move to WHOOP shows the other end of that same process. The team, the budget and the scale were already there waiting for him — precisely why a full-time hire made sense.

The takeaway for founders: before hiring a VP or CMO, ask whether your company looks anything like WHOOP's. If it doesn't, build the infrastructure first, so the eventual hire isn't being asked to do a job the company was never set up to give them.