James Cadwallader and his co-founder Dylan Babbs were working six days a week in an office before they had a company, or even an idea. James would drag Dylan into their coworking space on Saturdays, ban laptops, and fill a whiteboard with post-it notes; for a stretch, the leading idea was lithium mining. He calls it hardcore from day minus one. Twenty-one months after launch, Profound is a $1 billion company with more than 700 enterprise customers and over 13% of the Fortune 500 on the platform.
The thesis: marketing is about to change more than it has in the last 25 years. The old internet playbook was built for humans browsing the web. The next one is being built for AI agents interpreting it. When ChatGPT recommends a product, it doesn’t just give you a link. It opines, 3,000 characters at a time, and it’s a marketers job to drive what’s in those characters. James watched the last platform shift from inside the room, building Kyra and running creative for Nike, Unilever, and Prada while social and TikTok ate the old marketing playbook. Now he’s building the infrastructure for this one.
In this conversation, James maps the new marketing operating system. Why you’re no longer marketing to John Smith but to John Smith’s agent. The “Marketing Engineer”, a role Profound coined and Google has already hired for. Why ideas become the bottleneck when content costs nothing to produce. And the culture James calls the best product Profound has built: six days a week in office, and you can still leave at 6pm without anyone batting an eyelid.
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James Cadwallader is the co-founder and CEO of Profound, the AI visibility platform founded in 2024 that helps brands measure and shape how AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity talk about them. Profound serves more than 700 enterprise customers, including Target, Walmart, and U.S. Bank, and raised a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation in February 2026, led by Lightspeed with participation from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Cadwallader started Profound in New York City with co-founder Dylan Babbs after the two met at the startup incubator South Park Commons. Before Profound, he co-founded Kyra, a London-based creator marketing company that ran campaigns for brands including Nike, Unilever, and Prada.
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In this conversation with James Cadwallader:
00:00 Who is James Cadwallader?
03:56 What happens when ChatGPT recommends your product?
08:33 How do you market to machines instead of people?
11:10 How is this different to SEO?
15:00 What is a Marketing Engineer?
17:23 What is the antidote to AI slop?
20:56 When marketing copy is free, what’s the new bottleneck?
24:25 Can Profound get bigger than Adobe and Salesforce?
28:04 Why does Profound’s marketing team have only eight people?
33:57 How did Profound become a unicorn in 18 months?
37:22 Post-it notes and lithium mining: how did Profound begin?
40:49 Which AI tools actually run Profound day to day?
47:29 Why does James call culture the best product Profound has built?
53:54 What breaks when a startup crosses 250 people?
1:01:12 What is James most paranoid about?
1:04:44 Quickfire: workflows to kill, AI-era brands, business books, AI SDRs
1:06:00 What’s the recommended 90-day plan for a Fortune 500 CMO?
James’s sharpest lines from this conversation:
On the new question for every brand:
“In the old world of search, it was just this question of how do I rank? And in this new world, the question is not just do I show up, but how do I show up?”
On the antidote to AI slop:
“The antidote to slop, from my experience, is more context.”
On what AI still can’t know:
“There are things that you know about Audacious right now that Chat and Claude simply don’t know... You’re an API between reality and AI at this point.”
On his ambition for Profound:
“I’m never going to have another opportunity like this. This is it. This is my shot. So yeah, I’m kind of planning on trying to take it all the way.”
On enterprise speed:
“We work with giant Fortune 10 brands who are a lot faster than you’d expect.”
On culture:
“I’ve said a few times that our culture is the best product we’ve built. It’s the product that I’m most proud of.”
On who thrives at Profound:
“We look for masters of craft and people that are default hard working. That’s what they do if left to their own devices.”
On what he tells the team at all-hands:
“I’m very curious to see who in this room sticks it out when things actually get hard. Because right now we’re playing the game on easy mode.”
