Stop Reinventing the Wheel Every Quarter: A Conversation with Mateusz Zalubski

Not many people leave Google to join a bus company. Mateusz Zalubski did exactly that, and it's a good window into how he thinks about careers, marketing, and the value of a bigger challenge over a comfortable seat.

Mateusz is the CMO of Incogni, the privacy and data-protection product from Surfshark, and CMO of the Year 2024. Before this he was at Google in B2B marketing, then head of commercial development at FlixBus, co-founded and sold an e-commerce company, and joined Surfshark as head of marketing. He lectures at one of Poland's top business schools and runs growth in one of the most competitive spaces in SaaS.

Why he left Google

His Google stint was in the Warsaw B2B marketing team, and the constraint was real: the rules were often set by the main offices in London, Dublin, and Mountain View, so there wasn't total freedom. He tried to move from B2B to B2C internally and couldn't, so he decided the smarter play was a bigger challenge elsewhere, to learn faster. FlixBus was young, driven, international, and enormously ambitious (now the biggest bus company in the world, having acquired Greyhound and entering Australia). What it taught him was how brutal a transportation market is: a bus that departs half-empty still costs the same gas, bus, and driver, so you have to execute and understand supply precisely.

Shipping got easier, building something people want never did

Mateusz built and sold his e-commerce company while working full time at Google, and is refreshingly honest that he isn't "dialing in from the Maldives with a coconut." He tested eleven more ideas after it, all of which failed, and his biggest win from that venture, he jokes, is that he and his co-founder are still friends and were each other's best man.

He rejects the narrative that building is harder now because of competition. Building something with product-market fit was never easy and never will be, it's try, iterate, fail, learn. What has changed is that shipping is far easier: automated warehouses, Shopify, and vibe coding mean you can launch something to see if it sticks. People romanticize the past, but making something people desire was never easy. Only the shipping got easier.

Founder versus CMO: founder is harder

Asked which is harder, building from zero or scaling an established company, his answer is unequivocal: founder, 100%. Entrepreneurs are "built different," with drive, grit, and resilience at another level, a different sense of agency entirely. Growing something that already has traction and product-market fit is meaningfully easier than building from scratch. He has deep respect for the entrepreneurial mentality, and notes even socially, entrepreneurs gravitate to other entrepreneurs, wanting a different kind of freedom.

What separates CMOs who drive growth

It's easier for marketing to own performance in B2C than B2B, where there's always a push-pull with sales over who actually brought the client. The real divide, though, is generational. New-generation CMOs have a strong grasp of measurement, data, and attribution: they look at customer insights, sit in on user interviews and focus groups, and measure their campaigns' incrementality on the business. The old-school approach is more about message and creative, without always understanding the business impact. The new generation can actually prove their budget is well spent.

Marketers are too impatient

This is his sharpest, most contrarian point. Marketers are extremely impatient, always iterating and testing new things, and they forget the boring truth: you need a certain reach and frequency in your target audience, sustained over time, to build brand recall. If something works, keep doing it for an extended period instead of reinventing the wheel every quarter, because that repetition is what makes people actually know your brand and what builds a stable business. It's the same in leadership, you have to keep repeating things for a team to internalize the direction. The risk with test-everything marketers is that they forget repetition.

Marketing privacy, and why there's no blueprint

Marketing a privacy product isn't as boring as it sounds. Search identity theft, doxing, or pig-butchering scams and it's genuinely terrifying, and we're peaking globally on targeted attacks. People feel overwhelmed and want more security, and Mateusz finds real satisfaction reading feedback like someone escaping a stalking ex-partner thanks to the service. With GDPR only arriving in 2018 and the first US privacy law shortly after, and Incogni launching in 2022, he thinks the category is just getting started.

His framing for his team captures how he leads: no one has built the biggest, best data-removal and privacy service yet, so there are no books and no blueprint. It's fine to experiment, because only the data will tell you whether you're right. Be smart about the risks, but expect to win and fail, maybe 50/50, maybe 80/20, because no one has the answers for you. Pretending to know, he says, would be toxic; he's confident enough to just say "I don't know" and wants smart people around him who'll tell him he's wrong.

The three things leaders get wrong building teams

Recruitment. As companies grow, talent density loosens, and people underestimate hiring, settling for "good enough" out of pressure or fatigue instead of holding out for A-players and system thinkers. Recruit a weak team and you'll struggle; recruit great people and your job gets far easier.

Feedback. People avoid the short-term inconvenience of uncomfortable conversations, and also forget to give positive feedback. Go silent for twelve months and the performance review becomes an ambush. Deliver feedback every two to four weeks so people can course-correct and so trust builds, including the trust for them to challenge you.

The two-sided role. New managers have to represent both the business and the team. Lean only toward the business and you grind people into misery; lean only toward the team and everyone's happy but underperforming, which management won't reward. It's a careful balancing act, and missing it means you fail.

Key takeaways

Shipping got easier, building what people want didn't. Competition isn't why it's hard. Product-market fit was always a grind; only launching got cheaper.

Founder is harder than CMO. Building from zero demands a level of grit and agency that scaling an established company doesn't.

Stop reinventing the wheel every quarter. Reach and frequency sustained over time build a brand. Impatient marketers forget repetition.

There's no blueprint for a first. When no one has built the biggest yet, experiment and let the data judge. Pretending to know is toxic.

Feedback every two to four weeks. Silence followed by an annual ambush destroys trust. Regular feedback lets people correct and lets them challenge you.

Frameworks worth stealing

Reach, frequency, repetition

Before killing a working campaign to chase something new, remember the fundamentals: brand recall needs sufficient reach and frequency held steady over time. If it's working, keep doing it. The impulse to reinvent every quarter often destroys the repetition that was actually building your brand.

Hire for agency

Screen for a sense of agency, whether someone can objectively assess their situation and act on it. A candidate who changed companies or cities to learn something signals they'll keep optimizing what's around them. Pair that with basic data literacy and clear communication, and you have someone who raises the level of every discussion.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

People romanticize the past. Building something people desire was never easy. Shipping just got easier.

If something works, keep doing it, instead of reinventing the wheel every quarter.

No one has built the biggest privacy product yet. There are no books. Only the data will tell us if we're right.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. Quick questions, quick answers.

Best advice you've ever received? Not from a person but from Charlie Munger: it's more important to be consistently not stupid than to be brilliant. He also lives by "comparison is the thief of joy," and draws on Buffett, Naval Ravikant, and Sam Altman.

Advice you ignored and wish you'd listened to? Something investing-related, he should have followed the Bogleheads approach earlier: you won't beat the market, so buy it, low-cost long-term index funds, and relax.

What would you tell your younger self? Start investing earlier, and take better care of your health, body, and diet. Otherwise he's in a happy place.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Growth. Where to find the next levers, new channels, new growth loops.

Favorite spot? He stopped eating out a few years ago and cooks at home, having learned Neapolitan pizza during COVID. He's into tacos, burritos, ramen, and recently Indian food.

Tool you can't live without? He tries not to get addicted to tools, so, none in particular.

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Mateusz Zalubski is the CMO of Incogni, Surfshark's privacy and data-protection product, and CMO of the Year 2024. He previously worked at Google and FlixBus, built and sold an e-commerce company, and lectures at a top Polish business school. Find him on LinkedIn.