Bill King

Kraken is one of the world's most recognized cryptocurrency exchanges — and one of the most regulated, competitive, and scrutinized digital marketing environments on the planet. As Director of Growth, I lead organic growth strategy across the full surface: SEO, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), App Store Optimization (ASO), content, and referral programs.

The work that sets this role apart is at the frontier. I serve on Kraken's internal AI team, building the company into an agentic-led organization — applying AI and agents to scale marketing operations, content production, and the entire growth function. This is agentic growth in production, not a slide deck. It's where a poker mind pays off: read the table, find the asymmetric bets, and build systems that compound over time.

Underneath that frontier work, I run the organic levers that earn Kraken durable, low-cost growth — including AEO/GEO, the practice of getting Kraken discovered, cited, and recommended inside LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. That's a product problem as much as a marketing one: structured data, semantic clarity, entity recognition, and authoritative content architecture that trains models to treat your brand as the definitive source. It's a powerful lever — but it's one lever, not the whole game.

I joined Kraken to build something that didn't fully exist yet: a structured organic growth function at one of the world's biggest crypto exchanges. The challenge was real — crypto marketing operates under constraints most industries never face. Paid acquisition channels are restricted or outright banned. Compliance requirements are intense. And the competitive landscape moves at the speed of a 24/7 global market.

I built and scaled the organic growth practice from the ground up — standing up SEO programs, launching ASO strategies for mobile app discoverability, developing content systems, and architecting referral programs that turned users into a growth channel. The work here taught me how to build durable organic engines in environments where you can't buy your way to growth — you have to earn every user through systems, content, and product.

The promotion to Director of Growth came from the results: organic became a core growth lever at Kraken, not a side project.

Frase was an AI-powered content optimization platform — think of it as the early wave of what we now call AI-assisted SEO. As Head of Marketing, I owned the full stack: product marketing, content strategy, demand generation, SEO, brand, and positioning. A small team, a big ambition, and a product that was ahead of its time.

This was where I first saw the future of how AI would reshape organic growth. Frase used AI to help writers create content that answered real search queries — the same conceptual foundation that evolved into what I now call Answer Engine Optimization. Working at the intersection of AI and SEO before most people recognized it was a genuine intersection gave me a head start that still compounds today.

Frase was acquired by Copysmith, validating the bet the team made on AI-native content tools.

Drift pioneered conversational marketing — the idea that the best time to talk to a potential customer is when they're already on your website, not days later through a drip sequence. As Acquisition Marketing Manager, I drove top-of-funnel growth across paid and organic channels for one of the fastest-growing B2B SaaS companies in Boston.

The Drift experience sharpened my thinking about full-funnel marketing. Conversational marketing isn't just a channel — it's a philosophy about meeting buyers where they are. That principle now runs through everything I build: organic growth works best when it meets people at the moment of intent, whether that moment happens on Google, inside an LLM, on an app store, or in a conversation.

Drift was later acquired by Salesloft, cementing its place as one of the defining B2B marketing tools of its era.

AvidXchange is a B2B accounts payable automation company that went public in 2021. I joined when the company was scaling aggressively and needed a demand generation engine that could feed an increasingly ambitious sales organization.

I built and ran the full demand gen program — paid acquisition, content marketing, ABM campaigns, marketing automation, event strategy, and pipeline analysis. This is where I learned the mechanics of scaled B2B growth: how to build repeatable systems that generate qualified pipeline month after month, how to align marketing with a sales-led organization, and how to prove marketing's contribution to revenue in a way that earns budget and headcount.

The three years at AvidXchange gave me the operational rigor that distinguishes a strategist from a practitioner. Strategy is a hypothesis. Execution is the proof.

HubSpot is where my marketing career began in earnest — and it was the best classroom I could have asked for. Over three years, I worked my way from Customer Success Manager to Inbound Marketing Consultant to Senior Inbound Marketing Consultant, advising hundreds of companies on how to build inbound marketing programs from scratch.

HubSpot's philosophy — that the best marketing earns attention instead of buying it — became the foundation of everything I've built since. I learned SEO, content strategy, marketing automation, lead nurturing, CRM architecture, and the entire inbound methodology at scale, working with companies ranging from startups to enterprise. More importantly, I learned how to diagnose marketing problems quickly and prescribe solutions that actually get implemented.

HubSpot went public during my tenure. Watching a company IPO from the inside — seeing how growth compounds, how culture scales, how the story you tell the market has to match the product you build — left a permanent mark on how I think about building businesses.

TechTarget operates one of the largest B2B technology media networks in the world — a business built entirely on content-driven lead generation. As Campaign Manager and then Global Campaign Manager, I managed performance-based campaigns across TechTarget's network of technology-focused editorial sites.

This was my first exposure to the mechanics of content as a growth engine at scale — how editorial authority, audience targeting, and distribution systems combine to generate measurable business outcomes. The lessons about content-market fit and distribution that I learned at TechTarget still inform how I think about content strategy today.

Before I ever ran a marketing campaign, I spent six years playing online poker professionally — grinding up to $150/$300 stakes during my college years and beyond. Poker isn't a hobby on my resume. It's the foundation of how I think.

Every meaningful skill I use as a growth advisor, I first learned at the poker table. Pattern recognition: reading incomplete information and making the best decision available. Probabilistic thinking: understanding expected value, variance, and when the math says to bet big versus fold. Bankroll management: never risking more than you can afford to lose, because survival is the prerequisite for compounding. Systems thinking: building a repeatable process that generates edge over thousands of decisions, not just one.

More than any single tactic, poker taught me the discipline that still defines how I work: separate the decision from the outcome, respect variance, and keep betting your edge when the math is in your favor. That's exactly how durable growth gets built — not one lucky campaign, but a repeatable system that compounds an edge over thousands of decisions.