“How did they do that? How did they get there?” Companies succeed because of the people who build them - operating leaders who grow businesses to new heights and make decisions every day that can impact entire industries. Our Operator Spotlight gives you the inside track from one of our incredible Operator LPs (Limited Partners) who are changing the game – building and scaling some of the world’s most successful companies. Read on for lessons learned and mistakes made, perspectives from the top, practical advice, and ideas on what’s next.
We chatted with Astha Malik, Chief Business Officer of Braze (Nasdaq: BRZE). Astha has more than 25 years of experience across strategy, operations, sales, and marketing, consistently driving growth for premier public and private tech companies, including VTEX, Zendesk, Citrix, and PagerDuty. She now leads and shapes corporate strategy, marketing, operations, global expansion, growth engineering, among other teams. Under her tenure, Braze has grown to over $738 million in annual revenue. She sits on the board of Workiva and Everlaw, has been named to Forbes' Top 50 Entrepreneurial CMOs, and received the Stevie Award for Female Executive of the Year and the Business Leadership Award from the National Diversity Council.
Your title is Chief Business Officer, and you oversee a remarkably broad set of functions at Braze - strategy, marketing, operations, growth engineering, strategic consulting, and education. How do you think about holding all of that together? What's the connective tissue?
The connective tissue is customer value. When every team is anchored around how we create and deliver value to the customer, it becomes much easier to stay aligned, even with a broad remit.
That said, to lead effectively at scale, you have to get into the nitty-gritty and understand the details of how each function operates. I spend time talking with various teams about both long term strategy and day-to-day challenges. I have to alternate between a telescope and a microscope but the ability and willingness to do both is key. I have also practiced a T-zone leadership model. You need depth in key areas, but you also need the ability to connect elements across functions. The breadth also gives you the ability to proactively seek patterns that are not always obvious. When you can step back and see how different elements of the business relate to each other, you make better decisions and build stronger alignment.
Last but not least, you are only as good as your team and you need strong leaders who are aligned on the purpose. This common sense of purpose with an agile operating model and the right people - that is what ultimately holds everything together.
You came into Braze as CMO and, within a few months, took on the broader CBO role. What changed in how you operate when your scope expanded beyond marketing? What did you have to learn quickly?
The shift was less about changing how I think and more about applying my learnings across a broader remit. Over the course of my career, I have deliberately taken on roles that expanded my functional breadth - some were deliberate moves to gain a broader understanding of the business and some were happy accidents in growth companies. That included my time as Global VP of Strategy and Planning at Zendesk, and COO at VTEX, where I was already operating across multiple parts of the business.
Those experiences gave me a better understanding of how different functions operate and how they connect. When I stepped into the CBO role, I relied on that experience but I am also a first principles thinker. Every business is different and I tend to learn by doing, which means rolling up my sleeves, getting into the details, and building conviction throughout that process.
That depth and breadth gives you the conviction to lead at a 30,000 foot level with more clarity. You are not just connecting ideas conceptually, you act and monitor how they play out in practice and remain agile as you see the outcomes.
You've described your career as nonlinear - moving across sales, business development, product marketing, operations, and now running a combined business function. What are some of the benefits and tradeoffs?
A nonlinear path can feel risky, but I have always believed in taking a chance and learning more about myself by seeing myself do things. Some moves in my career were very deliberate, others came from timing or pure chance, some were because things didn't work out as planned, but each one helped me understand where I operate best, what I like and where I should rely on others. The upside is clear when things work as you envision, but even when they do not, you still learn and grow. That has always made the risk worth it.
Over time, I have realized that I do my best work in roles where I can use both sides of my brain. I have always been drawn to the intersection of creative and strategic/analytical work, which ties back to my formative years and my education in marketing and finance. That combination continues to shape how I approach problems and build teams.
I do not think about tradeoffs in a traditional sense, but I do think about the need for depth. Breadth alone is not enough. You have to develop real expertise in certain areas so you are not seen as a generalist. In growth environments, the key is to raise your hand, take on new challenges, and build both depth and range over time.
Braze's most recent Customer Engagement Review called agentic commerce potentially the biggest opportunity for marketers in a generation. What would a marketer actually need to do differently to capitalize on it?
Most marketers understand the opportunity. The hard part is whether they have the foundation and tools to act on it, because agentic commerce doesn't just change what marketers do, it elevates marketers' impact on the business by demonstrating measurable performance tied to critical use cases and moments. When AI agents curate and increasingly make purchase decisions on a customer's behalf, the implications run deeper than most playbooks account for. IDC has described the shift well: discovery is becoming intent-driven and agent-curated, experiences are highly personalized yet less brand-led, and post-purchase may end up as the last real arena for human-differentiated customer experience. That's a significant restructuring of where brand value actually lives.
Three things have to change for marketers to capitalize on it. Data has to be unified and available in real time. Agents make decisions based on the signals you give them, and fragmented or delayed data means missing live intent and losing the moment to competitors who can act faster. Brands also have to show up where discovery now happens, which increasingly means AI-mediated environments like ChatGPT, not just owned surfaces. And the direct customer relationship matters more than ever: even as agents mediate decisions, trust and brand preference still determine which options get surfaced and chosen.
What's easy to underestimate is that people are still in the loop. They hesitate, compare, and reconsider. Agentic commerce compresses discovery, but it raises the bar on real-time orchestration everywhere else: recovering lost conversions, reinforcing decisions, driving repeat behavior. The brands that get this right won't just be optimized for agents. They'll have built the kind of data foundation and customer trust that makes them the preferred answer regardless of how the decision gets made.
Tell us about an AI experiment at Braze that worked - something you took on recently that delivered real results. What did you try, what happened, and what would you do differently?
There is a lot of AI theatre everywhere, but what matters is how it shows up in practice. At Braze, that means building AI into both our product roadmap and how we operate internally. The acquisition of OfferFit (now known as BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™), which my team led from an M&A perspective, was a timely strategic bet that is now playing an important role in Braze’s AI-first strategy.
By embedding AI directly into decisioning, we enable marketers to move from broad segmentation to true 1:1 engagement, where every interaction is optimized in real time across message, creative, channel, timing, and offer. We have seen this come to life with customers like Kayo Sports, who used this approach to deliver more personalized experiences at scale, driving meaningful gains in subscriptions, cross-sell, and overall customer value.
That same philosophy applies internally. We use AI across our own teams to move faster, improve quality, and scale impact. Our lifecycle teams use tools like BrazeAI Operator to troubleshoot issues, build campaigns more efficiently, and create dynamic content that adapts by audience. We also use AI to analyze performance patterns across channels, automate decisions around timing and messaging, and continuously improve how we engage customers. Even in everyday workflows, AI plays a role in helping teams produce stronger outputs more quickly. Embedding AI into how we work, not just what we build, is what ultimately drives results.
What do you wish you had known about AI adoption a year ago that you know now?
Adoption depends heavily on people and how they work. I expected AI to evolve quickly, but the pace is exponentially faster than most organizations are set up to handle. There are moments where you feel like you have a grasp on it, and others where it is clear how much is still changing and how much you still have to learn to keep up.
One thing that has become very clear is that no one has fully figured this out yet. That has changed how I think about progress. You have to give teams space to experiment while still looking for signals that tie back to measurable outcomes. That balance is not always easy to get right.
It also reinforced that you cannot expect everyone to become an expert overnight. Teams need more than access to tools. They need training, context, and support to build confidence in how they use AI and how they interpret the output. At Braze, that has meant investing in both our customers and our own teams. We have scaled programs like the Braze AI Academy to help marketers apply AI in practical ways, and internally we launched an AI Ambassador Program to build capability across the organization through hands-on learning.
At the same time, we are embedding AI into how we operate, from internal tools that give our go-to-market teams better intelligence to broad certification efforts that ensure teams understand how to apply AI in real customer scenarios. Keeping people aligned while the technology continues to shift is where most of the real work is, and where the biggest opportunity sits.
You've built and scaled go-to-market at companies across very different stages - from PagerDuty pre-IPO to VTEX post-IPO to Braze at $738M in revenue. What changes most as a company scales? What breaks first?
What changes most as a company scales is how hard it becomes to stay aligned. Teams are further from each other and from the day-to-day details, which creates distance in how decisions get made, relayed and executed. One of the first things to weaken is the connection between teams and clarity on priorities. When that starts to slip, progress slows and execution becomes challenging.
Another important shift is around talent. You need to bring in experienced leaders who have seen scale before, but you also have to retain the institutional knowledge that got you there. Finding the right balance between those two is critical. If you lean too far in either direction, you lose either speed or context. The companies that navigate this well are the ones that continue to move with clarity as they grow.
What's a piece of conventional wisdom in marketing or go-to-market that you think is wrong - or at least overrated?
Experience is important but organizations that are scaling often try to hire from companies larger than them. This is not a bad idea, but hiring folks who are eager to run established playbooks won’t always cut it. No matter the scale, see if the folks you are hiring can work with ambiguity and are comfortable with discomfort. Relying on established playbooks can create a false sense of security. The current environment’s pace of change requires agility, creativity and a higher order of conviction to take risks.
What's the best advice you've received - or given - about how to manage people?
A leader’s shadow is long. The standard you demonstrate is the standard your organization will reflect. Teams pay close attention to how you show up, not just what you say.
That means being in it with them. No matter your role, you have to stay close to the work, especially during moments that matter. If you expect accountability, resilience, or a high bar, you have to model that consistently.
Over time, culture is shaped less by direction and more by example. When leaders operate with that mindset, it creates teams that are more engaged, more aligned, and better equipped to perform at a high level.
You now sit on the board of Workiva. What's a takeaway from your board experience that's made you a better executive at Braze?
Serving on a board adds a different perspective to leadership. You bring your operating experience, but you also gain visibility into how another company approaches similar challenges. You reflect and translate experiences in different environments and capacities and that pattern recognition makes you a better operator.
What's a piece of advice you would give to yourself 10 years ago, if you had the opportunity?
Keep taking the risks - dealing with the highs and lows, but trust yourself more and worry less.
