Marketing Manager, Startup Events & Community
Build and own high-impact startup events, hackathons, and community programs for Cursor to acquire, activate, and turn early-stage founders into advocates. Requires 4-7+ years in events/community/growth marketing, deep understanding of founders, and a builder mindset for data-driven program creation.
About the job
What You'll Do
Program Architecture & Segment Ownership
- Design the startup events playbook: Build and execute a data-driven marketing plan for the startup segment, focused on landing and growing usage within top Seed–Series B companies across YC and the broader ecosystem.
- Own the founder funnel and footprint: Deploy a mix of founder events, hackathons, executive/founder roundtables, and community activations to acquire the right startups and drive them toward meaningful success using Cursor.
- Build ecosystem relationships: Partner with VCs, accelerators, and other startup partners to reach their portfolio founders through growth programs, content, and co-hosted moments. Help identify which partners are worth going deep with.
- Creativity: Fearlessly break the standard playbook by avoiding generic engagement formats - find out how founders actually build and gather and design around that.
- Founder advocacy: Surface and amplify founder/customer stories worth telling, and feature them in our events. Become a trusted partner and peer to the founders using Cursor.
Measurement & Operational Excellence
- Event orchestration: Own programs end to end, from ideation and promotion to onsite experience and follow-up. Keep it scrappy and high-signal; obsess over the details that make founders feel Cursor cares about them early.
- Data-driven iteration: Track spend against real outcomes (activation, usage, retention, advocacy), not vanity metrics. Manage your budget toward the highest-impact investments and deprioritize what isn't working.
Cross-Functional Partnership
- GTM partnership: Work closely with the Events, Growth, PMM, and Field Engineering teams. Bring FEs into events to help founders build real automations, align on which startups show strong usage signals, and flag when a company is genuinely ready for an Enterprise conversation.
- Product and marketing partnership: Be the "eyes and ears" of the founder community. Feed real-time insights on messaging resonance, credits/billing confusion, feature awareness, and competitive shifts back to Product and Marketing.
What You’ll Bring
- Experience in or with startups: 4–7+ years in field, community, event, growth, or revenue marketing, ideally in B2B SaaS or developer tools. Understand founders and early-stage engineering teams, and how they buy, build, and talk to each other.
- Builder mindset: Self-starter who can build a program from scratch and then obsessively optimize it based on data.
- Community obsession: Genuinely like being around founders and builders, and know the difference between a program that feels authentic to that community and one that feels like a vendor hard sell.
- Storytelling: Communication is sharp, credible, and founder-native. Can hold your own in a room full of technical founders.
Role Specifics
- Field presence: Ability to travel (~20%) to host events, support hackathons, and connect with founders in-region.
- Event craft: Experience producing standout events, from intimate founder dinners to high-energy hackathons, that people actually want to attend.
- Location: In-office role based out of our San Francisco office.
Skills
Event Planning, Community Building, Growth Marketing, B2B SaaS, Developer Tools, Data Analysis, Vc Partnerships, Hackathon Organization, Founder Engagement, Storytelling, Cross-Functional Collaboration
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