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Navigating the Marketing Landscape: How Paroma Sen Led Astera Labs Through Their IPO Journey

In the high-stakes world of B2B technology marketing, few challenges match the intensity of guiding a company through an IPO with minimal marketing infrastructure. In a recent episode of Unicorn Builders, Paroma Sen, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Astera Labs, shared her experience joining a semiconductor startup with just two people in marketing and, within two months, helping navigate the company’s public offering.

The Two-Month Sprint to Wall Street

When Sen joined Astera Labs in January 2022, she found herself thrust into what she describes as “madness.” With an IPO scheduled for March, a major product launch on the horizon, and a significant industry event approaching, she questioned her decision. “In the first few weeks, I was like, what have I joined? This is madness. Am I going to kill my career?” Sen recalls.

But rather than being overwhelmed, she implemented what she now calls her “Tiramisu layering strategy” – building infrastructure, strategy, execution planning, and alignment simultaneously. “You can’t just do one without the others. You’re simultaneously working on all of those layers,” she explains.

Understanding Astera Labs’ Complex Ecosystem

Astera Labs operates in the AI infrastructure space, providing connectivity chips, memory controllers, and fabric switches that serve as “the nervous system of an AI server.” Their technology bridges CPUs and GPUs in server architecture, selling primarily to large hyperscalers while working closely with major chip manufacturers.

This technical complexity created a unique marketing challenge. Sen quickly realized that Astera Labs wasn’t speaking to just one audience but seven distinct groups: customers, partners, investors, analysts, press, current employees, and future employees.

“For a startup in the semiconductor business, they only talk to customers and they think that’s it because that’s where the money’s coming from. But for a startup going IPO, there’s more audiences,” Sen explains. Her solution was creating tailored messaging journeys for each audience segment rather than attempting to communicate everything to everyone.

From Marketing Police to Value Creator

Building marketing infrastructure from scratch meant Sen often found herself playing “brand police,” ensuring consistent messaging across channels. This unglamorous but necessary work laid the foundation for significant perception shifts in the marketplace.

Following their appearance at the Open Compute Project conference, industry observers noted that Astera Labs was “showing up like you’re much bigger than your brand.” Perhaps even more validating was feedback from the company’s general counsel who told Sen, “I’ve seen a lot of marketers and I’ve seen a lot of marketing strategies, but marketing adding real shareholder value is something I’ve not seen before.”

The CFO Connection: Marketing’s Unexpected Best Friend

When asked about advice for other marketing leaders, Sen offered an insight that contradicts conventional wisdom in many organizations: “A CFO should be your best friend.”

She elaborates, “That’s the first person you need to convince that the spends that you are proposing… are the right place to spend all of that money. And if you are able to convince the CFO, if he or she becomes your best friend, then the road ahead is that much smoother.”

This relationship-first approach extends beyond finance. Sen emphasizes that marketing leaders joining startups should “understand the business really well, understand the audience really well, and understand the players really well. Those are three different things completely.”

Embracing AI While Maintaining Marketing Integrity

Like many marketing teams, Sen’s group at Astera Labs has navigated the integration of AI tools into their workflow. She candidly shares that one of her biggest hurdles was “trying to use AI solutions in marketing and somehow feeling like I’m going against the grain of integrity.”

The team eventually found balance by “using AI generating websites and being able to still add our human value on top of that and not feel that, hey, am I just passing off my work to a tool and is that the right thing to do?”

This pragmatic approach to AI reflects Sen’s broader philosophy of adapting to change while maintaining core marketing principles.

Building for Scalable Growth

Rather than staffing for immediate needs, Sen structured her team around functional pillars – design, events, PR, and content – with an eye toward future expansion. “I hired people at that time. They were ICs, but I hired them so that they could grow in their careers and hire people below them as we scaled so that organic growth would remain part of what the team is able to do.”

This forward-thinking team design has allowed Astera Labs to gradually bring previously outsourced competencies in-house, giving them greater control over brand perception while maintaining operational flexibility.

The Road Ahead

Looking toward 2025, Sen aims to deepen Astera Labs’ partner marketing strategy and strengthen connections between their technical offerings and real-world AI applications. “How do we connect our story more with the application layer of what AI delivers? You know, the things that matter most and connect most with consumers out there?”

For B2B technology founders and marketing leaders, Sen’s journey offers valuable insights on building marketing functions that scale with company growth. By focusing on audience-specific messaging, forging strong internal relationships, and structuring teams for organic expansion, even the smallest marketing departments can position companies for outsized success in the marketplace.

As Astera Labs continues its growth trajectory in the AI infrastructure space, Sen’s “Tiramisu strategy” serves as a compelling blueprint for marketing leaders navigating the complex challenges of bringing technical B2B solutions to market.