A few weeks before Jean Brandolini-Lamb sat down for this conversation, an AI hardware company called Cerebras went public. For EquityZen, where Jean serves as CMO, the IPO was more than a headline. It was proof of concept. About 1,400 individual investors had bought into Cerebras through the platform starting in 2020, six years before the listing. The minimum investment was $5,000. The average price per share was roughly $32. At IPO, the stock opened at $185 per share, a 5.6x return.
These are the numbers that justify EquityZen’s entire mission. And Jean cannot use them to promote a single deal.
EquityZen operates in one of the most heavily regulated corners of fintech. Jean cannot recommend specific investments, cannot send targeted communications about deals unless users have explicitly expressed interest, and cannot deploy the kind of aggressive language that drives conversions in less regulated categories. The tension at the center of her job is both simple and relentless: how do you grow a platform when most of your audience doesn’t even know your market exists?
From Galleries to Growth
Jean didn’t take a straight line to fintech. She graduated with a degree in art history and spent her first years managing galleries. “I decided the part of it I liked the most was really the PR part, the comms part, the doing the marketing, trying to get reporters to write about what we were doing,” she said.
That instinct carried her from galleries into public relations, then into technology and financial services at institutions including JP Morgan and TIAA. She watched how the wealthy invested through special purpose vehicles designed for high-net-worth clients. When she joined EquityZen, she saw something different.
“I was amazed. I was like, wow, these guys figured out through processes and technology to take these same special purpose vehicles that used to be accessible only to the very wealthy, and they found a way to make them available to just your average accredited investor.”
EquityZen, now part of Morgan Stanley, is a two-sided marketplace that enables accredited investors to buy shares in private companies before they go public. On one side are shareholders, typically early employees or investors who need liquidity for personal reasons: a down payment, student loans, or in one case, a CEO who sold shares to fund a scholarship program. On the other side are investors looking for exposure to private-market companies, often in technology and AI. The platform’s purpose-built technology for manufacturing SPVs at lower cost allows it to offer minimums as low as $5,000, while competitors often start at $100,000 or more.
Category Awareness Before Brand Awareness
Jean manages three distinct audiences: individual investors, individual shareholders, and the private companies themselves. Each requires different messaging and different relationship-building. But before any of that work can begin, she faces a more fundamental challenge. Most of the eligible population doesn’t know the market exists.
“We’ve always been driven by the idea that we can’t lead with brand awareness. We have to lead with, we have to build category awareness.”
She has a simple test for this reality. “When someone new comes to work here, I say, did you know that you could invest in a private company before you came here? And most of them are like, no, and I told my friends and they couldn’t believe it.”
This shapes every growth decision. Rather than promoting individual deals, EquityZen invests in education. The company became one of two data partners with Yahoo Finance when the publisher began covering private companies. Investors can now search a top private company on Yahoo Finance and find information sourced from EquityZen. The partnership was built on a straightforward insight: if people are going to discover private investing, they’ll start where they already go to research public stocks.
In most consumer companies, a 5.6x return story would be the centerpiece of every ad campaign. At EquityZen, the compliance framework makes that kind of promotion impossible. Jean cannot market specific deals or send targeted communications unless a user has indicated interest first. Drew, the host, compared the dynamic to winning the World Series but not being allowed to yell about it.
Jean’s response was practical: “I think it just drives us to be more creative.”
She sees the constraint as productive. “We don’t think about compliance as someone who says yes or no. We think about compliance as our partner to help us get the word out.” In practice, compliance requirements pushed EquityZen into a consent-based, interest-driven marketing model. Users click a button on the platform to indicate interest in specific companies or categories. That zero-party data determines what communications they receive. “The more information you give us, the more relevant the communication we have with you can be,” Jean said.
The result is a deliberate filter.
“Maybe we really just want to reach the people who belong here and should be here and who are educated and want to educate themselves more. Rather than trying to reach everyone who’s looking for the next hot thing, we actually want to reach the responsible investor who is interested in some diversity and wants to invest in technology they believe in.”
Content Built from Questions
Jean’s content strategy mirrors the same education-first approach. EquityZen built a deep help center sourced entirely from real customer questions.
“We look for questions that new clients ask us. We look for questions in search and we answer those questions because there really wasn’t, before we started, one place where you could go to learn about investing in private markets.”
That library of long-form content created an unintended advantage. When AI-powered search engines began surfacing results from across the web, EquityZen’s education-first archive started ranking. “When we started this blog, no one was talking about AI search,” Jean said. “And then suddenly AI search started being a thing and we were like, oh, wow, long-form quality content actually helps you with search. That wasn’t our goal when we started. Our goal was to really help people.”
Marketing and product operate as a single unit. Jean described her relationship with product partner Sudeish as “inseparable,” noting that he was her first phone call of the day.
“Our product is what we offer. It’s our experience. But marketing and content is such a core part of that because people aren’t just seeking product, they’re seeking information.”
The teams share data across business operations, product, and marketing, looking at deal performance alongside action cards that help users form deeper relationships with the platform.
Where Accessibility Meets Ambition
If Jean had $100,000 with no compliance constraints, she would invest it in video. “Podcasts, in-office production, following the founders, clipping. We do video. I think I’m paying for more of our videos to be out in the world.”
Her team remains “small but mighty,” and she hires for adaptability over domain expertise. Some members came from regulated industries; others didn’t. “We’re always focused on why we’re trying to do something and maybe why we can’t from a compliance perspective and then see if we can get some common ground.”
With EquityZen now part of Morgan Stanley, Jean sees the integration as a chance to scale the company’s original mission. Morgan Stanley covers the private markets more broadly than any other institution, and Jean views that reach as an opportunity to bring accessible private-market investing to an even larger audience.
For a CMO who started in art galleries and found her way to one of fintech’s most constrained categories, the work has always come back to one question: how do you welcome people into a market they didn’t know existed? At EquityZen, 1,400 Cerebras investors and a 5.6x return suggest she’s found a working answer.
This season of CMO Uncovered is supported by CleverTap. CleverTap is the world’s leading engagement platform, helping brands build meaningful relationships through data-driven personalization. Powering over 2,000 customers globally, CleverTap’s AI-powered engine processes billions of data points daily to help marketers predict behavior and automate engagement at scale. From onboarding to advocacy, CleverTap provides the infrastructure needed to optimize every stage of the customer journey. For the CMOs building the next generation of iconic brands, CleverTap offers the precision and scale required to win in a crowded market. To learn more, visit clevertap.com.
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