You've raised. The science works. Marketing is still on your desk.

We went looking for Flanders climate and biotech companies that had raised recently and had nobody owning marketing. The pattern was consistent: the first marketing hire almost always lands after a company passes roughly twenty people and closes a Series A. Before that line, commercial work sits with a founder who is also running the science.

The instinct at that point is to hire a marketing manager. That hire takes three to four months to find, another three to ramp, and still needs someone above them deciding what matters.

What that leaves is a window. Somewhere between twelve and twenty-five people, freshly funded, with real customers in sight and nobody senior owning how the company is understood. Almost every company we looked at went through it. Almost none of them planned for it.