Over the last 30 years, and ~15 as a CEO, I’ve worked with a handful of people who have left a lasting impression on me through their raw intellectual horsepower, quantitative rigor, leadership ability, integrity, and drive. I’ve known Bryan Leach for 15 years, and although we’ve never worked directly together, we know each other well, and he’s absolutely one of those people. Every time I talk to him, I learn something.

In the following interview, Bryan shares candid insights on the marketing lessons he’s learned while leading Ibotta from an idea to an IPO. Bryan’s thoughts on the following should be required reading for investors and executives:

• Why marketing leaders are so critical in board meetings
• The type of marketing leader you need depends on the company's stage
• The balance between analytical rigor and brand
• Why looking for unicorns is futile
• The “batting average” concept of hiring
• Attracting top talent at different company stages
• Interviewing process and the ultimate “truth serum” question
• Why speed matters when it comes to getting the right person in a role
• Why a hybrid work model works well for some companies

‍Bryan Leach Bio

Bryan Leach attended Harvard University, Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar, and Yale Law School. After graduating from Yale in 2006, he clerked for Justice David Souter at the U.S. Supreme Court. Following a successful legal career, Bryan founded Ibotta in 2012 and has served as its CEO ever since. Ibotta is a technology company that delivers cash back rewards to consumers on qualifying purchases through its direct-to-consumer platforms and a network of publisher partners. Under Bryan’s leadership, Ibotta reached a $1 billion valuation following its Series D in 2019, and it became a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange in April 2024 — the largest tech IPO in Colorado history.

‍"You have to understand what proof points you’ll need to raise your next round or exit."

‍

John: If you had the benefit of hindsight as you built and scaled the marketing team at Ibotta, what advice would you give yourself in 2011?

Strategic Perspective

Bryan: I would have started with a deep understanding of what I needed to prove over time. This will influence who you hire at what stage. What will investors expect to see in 2, 4, or 10 years? Whether it’s for acquisition, IPO, or a major funding round, those proof points define your strategic priorities and talent strategy.

Analytical Rigor

Bryan: You quickly realize that many of those proof points are delivered by the marketing team. In a consumer-facing or B2B company, especially in the early days, it’s the CMO—not the CFO—who is often the most critical person in the room during fundraising. Investors are evaluating your grasp of LTV, CAC, payback periods, and ROI by channel. At one point, we had over a $100M annual marketing budget, so analytical rigor was essential.

At Series B, it’s no longer enough to say, “We have product-market fit.” You must detail your channel strategies, risks of CAC inflation, and plans for deploying capital. You need to make sure your marketing leaders are up to the task.  

‍"Not everything valuable is measurable — our Nuggets jersey patch proved that."

Brand and Resource Stewardship

John: How about the balance and progression of the importance of brand?

Bryan: A great marketing leader at scale must also steward the brand. Even if you're strong in direct response, you must also invest in your brand over time. For instance, we put Ibotta’s logo on the Denver Nuggets’ jersey. It’s not easily measured, but we know it adds value to our employment brand, awareness, and cross-channel efficiency.

Liquid Death is a great example. They run marketing like an SNL writers' room—pitching wild ideas, building skits, and creating buzz. They’ve built significant value with relatively little bottom-of-funnel spend. I’ve learned to respect brand architecture, positioning, and the formal thinking and documentation that comes along with it. I’ve also learned that at scale, marketers need to write, structure, and document to ensure that different departments within larger organizations can align effectively.

‍"Trying to find the unicorn can be perfect as the enemy of the good.”

Hiring Philosophy

John: What about the hiring process?

Bryan: Another learning would be my hiring perspective. It's hard to find everything in one person. It’s rare to find a person who's a fantastic analytical marketer and also a fantastic brand ideator, or a person who's a great B2B marketer as well as a D2C marketer. Trying to find the unicorn can turn into the perfect being the enemy of the good. And then you just don't get anyone in the role. 

John: That resonates. I’ve said this before, but it's similar to the medical profession. If I need a retinal transplant, that's different than getting a hip replacement, and the best doctors are the ones who say, “I don’t know, that’s outside my expertise, and we should get a second opinion or someone who specializes in something I don’t.” 

Bryan: Exactly. Someone who can say, “I'm not your person for that, but I have an idea of someone else we can bring in on the problem.”

‍"We wanted to see how they think — no PowerPoint required."

John: How do you structure interviews to cut through polished marketing talk?

Bryan: We almost always have our people do an exercise. In the early days, we would have them do a take-home exercise. We asked them to come up with a plan or proposal on a specific idea that we came up with, or we gave them a few leading ideas, and then they would pitch it and make a business case for it. And we would ask them, “How would you measure the success of it? How would you know whether it could scale?” Just kind of testing the ability to think a little bit like an entrepreneur, but in the context of marketing. 

What we realized over time is that creating a take-home exercise wasn’t good enough.  We also needed something that would test the ability to think on your feet.  And we needed to make sure that the work product presented was actually created by the candidate without outside help.  So we started creating an in-room exercise where the candidate was given 30 to 45 minutes to think. Then we came back and had a whiteboarding session together. You don't have a PowerPoint? Who cares. Can you whiteboard through an idea or two? So we started doing that. That was helpful.

‍"What will your last boss say your strengths and weaknesses are — when I talk to them?"

 Scorecards & the Truth Serum Question

John: Do you use some form of ghSMART type of scorecarding for interviews? How do you debrief afterward?

Bryan: I find many scorecarding methodologies feel like they’re written by someone who lacks operational experience. They can be far too time-consuming to ever be implemented in the form described in the book. However, the book Who by Geoff Smart does have some very good ideas. The one that I use in every single interview is what he calls the “truth serum question.” And I do it exactly like the book describes.

So I say, “John, who was the last person you reported to? Andy Smith. Okay, when I talk to Andy and I ask him what were your greatest strengths were, what will he tell me?” Oh, he'll say, I'm great, blah, blah, blah. 

And then when I talk to Andy, not if I talk to him, but when I talk to Andy, and I ask him, “What are your biggest gaps or areas for improvement?” What will he say? And then you start to explain that “I want it too bad, I care too much, and I'm too much of a perfectionist, etc…” Then, right as they open their mouth, I interject, “Just let me clarify. The way I'm grading this response is not based on what you now say, but instead based on the congruence between what you now say and what he tells me when I talk to him.”  

And then they often begin just spewing out an unbelievable amount of information. And you're like, “Whoa, whoa, back up. Tell me about the criminal charges again?” People do this rapid calculus and realize they need to come clean on a few things, just in case. You can see their brain working. They're like, “I better disclose this, he's going to find out anyway. And my old boss is definitely going to say this, so I better get out in front of it now.” It is unbelievably effective. So I do that in every interview, marketing or otherwise.

‍“Speak last in debriefs and if you get it wrong, act on it sooner rather than later.” 

Order of Operations

Bryan: I realized long ago that when we debrief on candidates, it's incredibly important that I go last. Because if I speak before anybody else, it so irreparably changes the dynamic that you can't find out what other people think. Then we took that a step further and made people use Greenhouse or some sort of tool to record their thoughts – up, down, sideways – before the group dialogue.

John: The JFK roundtable philosophy. He never spoke before any of his advisors.

Bryan: Exactly. It’s so easy to get into a groupthink type of situation. Those are some things from the interview process that we've done, but I think a lot of it also has to do with just being willing to move on from candidates when you get it wrong. It's a batting average. And when you get it wrong, it's like, ah shoot, we got it wrong.  I think a mistake that a lot of companies make is that they keep an underperforming employee on way too long, just out of a sense of obligation.

John: Your batting average parallel is a great point. I've seen people interview 25 candidates for a role, eight interviews per candidate. They intend to be super-diligent, but in some ways, they're so scared of making a mistake that they have taken way too much of their team’s time and still may not hire the right person. Part of this may be the fear or realization that they are somehow trapped with this hire forever.

Bryan: Exactly. They end up taking seven, eight months for a role where you could have triangulated your top five in 2 months.  You don't make the shots you don't take.

John: I always waited too long early on. I just had faith that with enough coaching and 2nd chances, they’d pull the plane up. When you know it's time, it's already probably six months too late.

Bryan: It's trite, but so true, which is that I've never talked to any CEO who's ever said she or he regretted letting go of a person. Not one person has ever said to me, “I made a mistake, I probably shouldn't have let that person go. Ever.”

"We're in the business of giving people money — it's unambiguously helpful."

John: How do you attract top-tier marketers in a competitive landscape?

Bryan: When you're in the early stages, you can't pay at market or above market. You don't have a liquid public currency, which is incredibly helpful in attracting talent. You aren't a well-known brand that's going to burnish somebody's CV to the same extent that it will later on when you're more successful. So, you have to figure out what the employment value proposition can be to offset those things. We leaned very heavily on “you're going to get experience here that you wouldn't get at a larger company earlier in your career. You're going to get access to the senior decision-makers. That's great for mentorship and learning and development. You'll get to manage teams of people sooner. You'll manage a P&L sooner.” You can monetize these things by saying that you got a chance to do them much earlier in your career. You'll also learn who you are and what you want to do for the rest of your career.

And then leaning into our mission. We're in the giving-away-money business. Come here and you're unambiguously helping people. Everybody's always helping people, but there aren't too many plays of more directly and clearly and unambiguously helping someone than, “Here's some money,” right?

Those are the two things. And then, you know, we leaned into Denver. We were one of the few mobile app companies in Denver, one of the few that had any kind of consumer presence. Think back to 2013. There were Craftsy, Ibotta, and a few more. So, some people just want to live in this part of the world and want to do work that they can sort of tell people at a cocktail party, “here's what I do.” That kind of ability to work on a consumer-facing business was a big part of how I sold Luke, our CTO, for example, on coming here. Later on, I think it's very different.

Now, we're a profitable public company. That means we control our destiny to a greater extent. Now, when I hire people, I can say that a decent portion of their compensation will come from RSUs. And oh, by the way, here's where we are heading and why that is exciting.  Being able to tout the fact that we have had 50 million downloads of our mobile app, and that we have given away over $2B in cash back rewards – that is also meaningful. And of course, we pay much better than we used to. So, things are different. We expect more. The bar is higher.

"You don’t book a Zoom to ask, ‘Is this spreadsheet right?’"

John: Why is moving to Denver and coming into the office so important to you?

Bryan: Every company is different.  At Ibotta, we like having people in the office three days a week because no employee or department is an island. Especially in marketing, you've to build and maintain a good relationship with other departments, including sales, finance, product, and engineering. 

Shared context arises via both explicit instruction and tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge occurs when you watch people do things, when you get pulled into meetings – more through osmosis. When someone spins their chair around and says, “What do you think of this? “Am I doing this right? You're not always going to schedule a Zoom meeting to ask for clarification or guidance. And that barrier might mean you don't ask and you don't get that level of professional development. So, for younger people who are in the first part of their career, it's valuable to be able to shadow and apprentice in that way, for at least part of the week. That said, we also see the value of flexibility, especially living in Colorado, where it's great to get out of town and not fight the traffic on a Friday afternoon after work. We also have a lot of talented employees who work remotely and who contribute mightily to Ibotta.  So, we try to strike a balance with that, and that takes the form of a Denver-first hiring policy for future hires.

That last thing I’ll say is that I do believe we have a responsibility to the community to be working within the community. And that means having our people downtown, where they can go out to lunch, visit the local coffee shop, or have a drink together after work.  Because otherwise we're part of the hollowing out of our city, and that's ultimately bad for our entire community, the small business ecosystem, and ultimately, Ibotta as well. 

"I’ve had great recruiters. I’ve had terrible ones."

John: What’s your experience with external recruiters?

Bryan: I’ve had great experiences. I’ve had bad experiences. And everything in between. What I look for are recruiting firms that aren’t afraid to align incentives. For example, I know RevelOne doesn’t receive final payment until the candidate accepts the offer. That alignment matters. The flip side of that model? Some firms get paid whether they find someone great or not. You can end up with a junior person from New York or SF who doesn’t understand Denver’s culture or how to recruit here. 

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the hourly model. I worked with someone who charged hourly – loved that approach – but it was just one person, right? So, there was a limit to the national reach of their network.

Then there are tech recruiters like Conor Swanson—unbelievably plugged in and deeply invested in knowing everything about everyone’s business, long before they need anything from you. They add value upfront, and they’re who you naturally turn to. You don’t need to explain who you are—there’s already a shorthand because of the relationship. I know RevelOne works similarly with its partners.

And then there’s a whole category of contingency recruiters - good and bad – who we’ve used over the years. The kind who go straight to your mediocre competitor, grab their mediocre talent—the kind you wouldn’t hire anyway—and pitch that to you.

John: Retreads-R-Us?

Bryan: Right. Exactly. Or they just don’t take the time to understand the culture, or the unique flow of information in your organization—what gets rewarded, what succeeds. They don’t take the time to study who’s thrived in the past, what their personalities and work styles have been like.

"Sometimes a 6-week expert beats a full-time generalist."

John: What’s your view on fractional or project-based marketing talent?

Bryan: I used to resist it. It felt like deferring a decision. But for discrete projects—segmentation, brand analysis, and research—it can work great. It’s similar to hiring a fractional CMO or a specialist agency. We’ve had full-time people volunteer to step in to take on work in an area they haven’t worked in before. Sometimes, with the benefit of hindsight, a short-term expert might have delivered better results faster. Interim roles can be culturally easier too—less threatening to the existing team.

John: Bryan, as always, thank you for the time and wisdom. See you soon.

About RevelOne

RevelOne is a specialized go-to-market search & advisory partner that drives Growth through People. Growth strategy and talent strategy are completely intertwined, yet often handled by different people. We staff projects with expertise across both to support our clients in sharpening their growth plans and ensuring they have the right full-time and part-time talent to achieve their specific goals.  

Over the past 10 years, we’ve successfully placed 1,700 people at over 750 clients, including both tech companies and traditional companies looking for modern GTM leaders. Over 50 of these clients are now unicorns.

Our GTM retained search practice focuses on Marketing, Sales, Client Success, and Partnerships/BD permanent hires for all levels, from executives to directors, managers, and team buildouts. We can also source temporary hires – pre-vetted GTM experts – for strategy and execution on interim, part-time, or project-based engagements.

Contact: Have a GTM question, a new hire, or a problem you’d like to solve? Reach out to RevelOne today to discuss: jlevisay@revel-one.com