Building the Future of Marketing with Raffi Salama, CEO & Co-Founder @ Passionfruit

Happy Wednesday from James Pringle, Hector Mason and the Riding Unicorns team!

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James Pringle is joined by Raffi Salama, Co-Founder & CEO of Passionfruit, a fast-growing marketing OS used by the world’s most ambitious brands to orchestrate campaigns across resourcing, planning, execution, and tracking.

Raffi shares his journey from launching David Beckham’s Inter Miami football club to scaling Passionfruit across London, Lisbon, and now New York. What started as a freelance marketplace has evolved into a full-stack platform for marketing teams in the AI era, already used by the likes of PepsiCo, L’Oreal, Motorway, and Klaviyo.

We explore:

🛠 The evolution of Passionfruit from talent marketplace to vertical SaaS
 🎯 Why every marketing campaign is like launching a mini business
 🤖 How AI and voice tooling are changing workflows inside enterprises
 🧠 Dogfooding, distribution, and why Passionfruit must walk the talk
 🎥 Creators as employees — and the future of influencer equity
 📊 Why distribution is the biggest challenge of the AI age
 ⚖️ The 3 hiring principles that drive Passionfruit’s culture and velocity
 📈 Raffi’s personal evolution as a founder from “glorified intern” to visionary CEO
 🍽 His dream dinner guests (with a little NFL chat thrown in)

This is a must-listen for anyone building in B2B SaaS, marketing, or the future of work, or simply curious about what a next-gen startup looks like under the hood.

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Have a great Wednesday,

The Riding Unicorns team