A framework for why CMO hires at startups often fail, and what to check before assuming a CMO placement (internal or external) will succeed: (1) lack of deep trust with the founding team — marketing decisions are judgment calls that need founder confidence to execute without constant second-guessing; (2) lack of product/market/domain fluency — a CMO who doesn't deeply understand the product can't make credible positioning calls; (3) the unusually heterogeneous skill set the role demands, spanning performance marketing, brand/design, and events/field marketing, disciplines that rarely live in one person's prior experience. Herzberg's own path to CMO sidestepped (1) via Founding Team's Pre-Existing Shared History as a Trust Accelerator and (2) via her prior product role at Wiz, and addressed (3) partly through Founders Must Do the Job Themselves Before Delegating It — doing the marketing function herself first, end to end.