As the chief marketing officer of Squarespace, Kinjil Mathur leads the company’s world-class marketing and PR teams. Before Squarespace, Kinjil served as CMO at Foursquare where she successfully repositioned the company’s brand to accelerate growth in both the consumer and enterprise location intelligence businesses. Kinjil spent the previous decade building technology competencies for retail giants, most notably as vice president of digital marketing for Saks Fifth Avenue. I spoke to her about her career advice and how Squarespace is using marketing to support missions that matter to them.
How did you end up at Squarespace? What was your career path?
I’ve spent my career helping big brands build their influence. I started off at IBM, and then after 10 years in the luxury retail e-commerce space at Saks and Neiman Marcus, I came back to my tech roots and held the CMO position at Artspace and then Foursquare. Now at Squarespace, I have the incredible opportunity to empower millions of individuals to build their personal brand and make their mark on the world.
Squarespace is a company that helps build brands for the independent workforce, which makes up around 30% of the entire working population. Being part of a company that empowers entrepreneurs to find their voices and bring their own dreams to life felt like a natural progression of my career.
What is a workday like? Please walk me through a day
The beauty of my job is that no two days are the same. Though the one thing that is consistent: back-to-back meetings, all day every day. Marketing can often act as the glue that connects all different parts of the organization, ensuring we’re focused on solving the right problems our customers are facing and that we’re connecting with them in a real way through our solutions. Whether it’s collaborating with the design team to align on the creative vision for a marketing campaign, meeting with the product team to find out what’s next for Squarespace, or whiteboarding go-to-market strategies for new countries with my marketing team – each day is different, intense and thought-provoking. I wouldn’t change that for anything.
What are your responsibilities as the chief marketing officer at Squarespace?
I think CMO at Squarespace doubles as Chief Motivational Officer since my main objective is to inspire the makers, thinkers, and doers of the world to bring their creative business ideas to life with our platform. This is what makes me pop out of bed each morning. Objectively, I’m responsible for setting and delivering the company’s global growth targets.
Squarespace and Ladies Get Paid hosted the event Tipping the Scales: Closing the Wage Gap and the Fight for Equal Pay. How is Squarespace working to affect social change?
Squarespace is a company that empowers individuals to go out there and make their dreams come true. We live by this ethos, and we’re always thinking about ways we can use our voice to deliver that message to the people who need to hear it most. When we saw customers like the Women’s March and Time’s Up using Squarespace to affect real social change – simply put, we were inspired. It was their stories, and the stories of many other inspirational women on our platform, that sparked the idea to bring awareness to the issue of Equal Pay. By offering a symbolic discount of 20%, we’re shedding light on why pay equity is important and hope that it’s the incentive some woman-identifying entrepreneurs need to get started building their own business.
Has your experience as a first-generation Indian American shaped your professional career or dedication to social change?
I live by the immigrant mentality to “earn your job every day.”The work never stops because the hustle is real, and there are many less fortunate people that would die for what you have. That’s how my parents raised me, and so, with every step up in my career, I feel a deep sense of responsibility to be louder, work harder and deliver greater impact. Now more than ever, that extends beyond business impact and includes an additional sense of responsibility to also drive the business through meaningful social impact. It’s not an easy mandate to set with my team, but I feel lucky to have a roster of badass, solution-oriented, young men, and women that enjoy solving tough problems with me every day.
You’ve said that Squarespace is “dedicated to empowering all individuals.” How are you making that a touchpoint in your role as CMO?
That mission is at the core of everything we do at Squarespace internally and externally. I try to embody this sentiment by empowering my own team. I want them to feel encouraged to bring big ideas to the table, voice their opinions in meetings, and know that they can affect real change within our team and organization.
What is one thing that you wish you had known when you were starting out your career?
Putting yourself out there to seek networking and mentorship opportunities is often one of the most difficult things to do early in your career, but they’re both invaluable experiences. If you lay the groundwork for both early on by dedicating time, you’ll be well-served by a strong network later in life. When networking, the new people you meet allow you to identify new opportunities that might challenge or grow your career. In a mentor relationship, a mentor’s long-term knowledge helps grow self-awareness so that you’re looking for the right opportunities for you. Take the knowledge you gain from others, balance these different perspectives against each other, and always trust your gut.
