At the intersection of deep technology and market transformation stands Surbhi Agarwal, a leader whose career defies conventional boundaries. Her foundation as an electrical engineer provided the bedrock of rigorous, systematic thinking, while her MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business equipped her to translate that technical depth into powerful business strategy. This unique dual expertise has fueled an exceptional journey from orchestrating global launches at Intel and scaling AI at Google Cloud, to building the marketing function as CMO of the autonomous systems leader, Applied Intuition.
Now, as the Founder and CEO of Magdalena Capital and Former Chief Marketing Officer at Applied Intuition, she has fully embraced her role as a strategic amplifier, dedicating herself to helping AI-native startups define new categories and achieve scale. More than her impressive résumé, it is her human-centric philosophy, the belief that true leadership empowers people and that technology must solve real human problems that makes her a truly influential force shaping the future of business.
The Journey from Silicon to Strategy
Surbhi Agarwal’s professional journey is a testament to the power of intellectual curiosity. She began in the precise world of electrical engineering, where she designed complex hardware chips at Synopsys and Siemens-EDA for semiconductor OEMs. While she loved solving technical problems, she found herself consistently drawn to the bigger picture questioning the ‘why’ behind the products: their application, use case, and ultimate business impact.
This fundamental curiosity was the catalyst for a pivotal transition. She pursued an MBA at Berkeley Haas, deliberately shifting from pure engineering to the world of business. This move unlocked a series of formative roles: first in Corporate Strategy at McAfee, and then onto the sales team at Intel. At Intel, she led the monumental Windows 10 launch across five major enterprises HP, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Intel, an experience that prepared her for the scale she would later encounter at Google Cloud.
At Google Cloud, leading product marketing for BigQuery, CloudAI, and AutoML, Surbhi Agarwal mastered creating AI product categories, achieving large-scale impact, and bridging complex high technology with compelling storytelling, propelling her into leadership. Today, she views the role of Chief Marketing Officer and GTM operator as the heart of the business, connecting product, sales, customers, and growth, with marketing focused on clarifying complex technology and building trust to solve customers’ most pressing problems.
Precision Meets Purpose with Zero Margin for Error
Surbhi’s foundation was built in the high-stakes worlds of semiconductor design and aerospace, including high-performance computing projects for NASA, where the margin for error is zero. This early rigor shaped her leadership and marketing, instilling respect for products and strategies with real-world impact. From Cloud AI at Google to autonomous systems at Applied Intuition, she understands how technology directly affects human lives, from daily customer interactions to national defense.
Consequently, Surbhi’s perspective on marketing transcends messaging and campaigns. For her, it is ultimately about the solemn responsibility of delivering trust and undeniable value to customers when the stakes are at their highest. This unique background is the bedrock of her leadership, a constant reminder that true impact is built on a foundation of unwavering precision and purpose.
From Technology to Intuitive AI Innovation
What truly electrifies Surbhi Agarwal about today’s AI landscape is its profound democratization. AI has shed its skin as a niche technical tool to become a core business strategy and, most excitingly, a daily utility in everyone’s hands. This shift is collapsing traditional corporate silos and creating a powerful, bottom-up demand that is reshaping organizations from within.
Surbhi Agarwal believes the true power of technology emerges when it anticipates rather than just automates. In marketing, this means predicting which accounts are ready to buy and tailoring experiences for a CIO versus a systems engineer. In customer experience, AI is at the forefront with agentic workflows to foresee customer needs and remove friction. This approach turns strategy into a dynamic, living process, enabling companies to adapt in real time, iterate rapidly, and make decisions guided by foresight, reshaping the rhythm of business.
Transforming Storytelling into a Driver of Marketing Growth
The marketing playbook has been fundamentally rewritten, and Surbhi Agarwal has led its most critical chapters. She has seen marketing evolve from a peripheral storytelling function into the engine of business growth, driven by strategic alignment and data-driven accountability. Gone are the days of siloed marketing today, it must integrate with sales, product, and customer success. At Yellow.ai, Surbhi fused product strategy, brand narrative, and demand generation into a single engine, helping the company earn Gartner Magic Quadrant Challenger recognition.
Simultaneously, the adoption of AI has ushered in an era of unprecedented precision and accountability. Marketing now operates with razor fast pace yet with lean budgets, using predictive analytics for lead scoring and hyper-personalized outreach to generate higher outcomes. For Surbhi Agarwal, this evolution transforms the very definition of success: she doesn’t chase impressions, but drives the metrics that truly matter: pipeline growth, measurable revenue, ROI, and authentic, lasting customer engagement.
Orchestrating a Global Tech Revolution
A defining chapter in Surbhi’s career unfolded during her tenure at Intel, where she played a pivotal role in the global launch of Windows 10. This wasn’t just another product rollout; it was a moment that crystallized her unique ability to orchestrate complex, multi-stakeholder ecosystems and translate technical innovation into compelling market value – at a global scale.
Tasked with aligning Intel’s hardware advancements with Windows 10 software, Surbhi Agarwal worked closely with Microsoft, HP, and Dell, crafting a unified story around performance, security, and mobility. She went beyond specs, providing tailored sales kits and training to make upgrades tangible, learning that technology’s true power lies in collaboration and customer-focused storytelling, a lesson that became a cornerstone of her leadership, shaping her vision to bridge the gap between silicon and story.
The Power of Multidisciplinary Leadership
A career that spans from silicon to storytelling gives Surbhi a rare vantage point across technology and GTM. Her journey through chip design, AI at Google, and high-growth startups like Yellow.ai and Applied Intuition shaped a powerful leadership lens, blending engineering precision, global scale, and agile creativity to drive transformation through insight and innovation.
Her true strength lies at the intersection of these experiences, seeing technology, product, and marketing as interconnected. This allows her to translate technical roadmaps into boardroom value and align campaigns with engineering milestones, giving her a multidisciplinary perspective that drives deeply informed, holistically strategic leadership.
Turning Challenges into Strengths
As a woman navigating the male-dominated fields of engineering, AI, and executive leadership, Surbhi knows what it means to constantly prove her place. In the early stages of her career, the pressure to demonstrate her technical credibility in rooms where she was often the only woman was immense.
Surbhi Agarwal turned this challenge into her greatest strength, discovering that her perspective as a woman engineer, connecting different viewpoints, and reading unspoken dynamics was actually a superpower. Her impact went beyond technical skill, helping engineers, business leaders, and customers understand each other.
The Evolution of a Leader
Surbhi’s leadership journey is shaped by growth and learning moving from seeking certainty to cultivating capability. Once believing a leader needed all the answers, she now focuses on asking the right questions and empowering her team. Built on clarity, shared goals, and radical trust, she gives trust from day one, creating belonging and psychological safety. From Fortune 500s to agile startups, this foundation sparks innovation, enabling teams to take risks and unleash their full creative potential.
Ultimately, Surbhi Agarwal sees her leadership as a practice of adaptability rather than a fixed style. She’s learned that change is constant, so she adjusts her approach to meet each moment’s challenges, keeping her leadership as flexible and dynamic as the industries she helps shape.
A Strategy for Dynamic Markets
In the whirlwind of AI and tech, where new startups and use cases emerge at lightning speed, Surbhi has learned that rigid annual planning would deter any GTM machine. She embraces agile foresight, treating strategy as a flexible blueprint, exploring multiple scenarios asking, “What if regulations accelerate autonomous vehicle adoption?” or “What if a competitor pivots or a customer needs shifts?” This approach keeps her strategy adaptable and future-ready.
She engages in strategic planning on a weekly, sometimes daily, cadence, treating it as a continuous conversation. Each potential scenario is weighted against key parameters, with pros and cons rigorously debated. This creates a living, data-driven framework that brings clarity to critical decisions from campaign budgets to resource allocation ensuring her teams can pivot with confidence amid constant uncertainty.
The Alchemy of High-Performing Teams
Surbhi Agarwal approaches team-building like a conductor orchestrating a symphony, harmonizing diverse talents to create something greater than the sum of its parts. She builds elite teams on creativity, commitment, and collaboration, seeking individuals who are customer-curious, eager to learn, and thrive on collective problem-solving. To foster cross-functional cohesion, she empowers marketing teams to collaborate daily across functions, granting strategic visibility and autonomy to drive impactful decisions
Understanding that her buyers are often technical experts, Surbhi makes sure every team member from marketers to SDRs truly grasps the industry and the customer’s world. One day they might build an AI workflow, the next craft a thought-leadership story, all within a culture of trust supported by open postmortems, shared accountability, and celebrating small wins. When everyone feels genuinely part of a bigger, shared goal, the team’s performance naturally soars.
Finding Balance Through Daily Micro-Rituals
In an industry that moves at a breakneck pace, Surbhi champions a philosophy of “speed above all things,” a standard that makes the concept of fully disconnecting a near impossibility. Yet, she has mastered the art of finding equilibrium not in grand gestures, but in deliberate, daily micro-rituals.
For Surbhi, balance is woven into the fabric of her life through these small, consistent practices. It might be the 15 minutes of morning yoga that centers her day, a Sunday hike with her son that provides perspective, or a simple coffee chat with a trusted peer. She deeply values her “lean-in circle,” a support network offering both a safe harbor during challenges and practical guidance, while mentoring keeps her grounded, reminding her of core values, humbling her through the impact she creates, and reaffirming what truly matters.
Surbhi Agarwal’s Next Chapter
Having just completed a transformative chapter building the marketing function at Applied Intuition, Surbhi stands at a familiar crossroads: the intersection of deep technology and its real-world impact. Her career, spanning titans like Intel and Google Cloud, has been unified by a single belief: the most meaningful innovation happens when technical brilliance is bridged with clear business strategy and genuine customer adoption.
Now, she is channeling this philosophy into her latest venture, Magdalena Capital, working hands-on with tech founders to build and scale AI-native startups. Combining engineering rigor, product vision, and GTM leadership, she amplifies her impact across the ecosystem while mentoring the next generation to grow the industry with intelligence and heart. Surbhi’s vision for 2025 and beyond is clear: to remain at the frontier where AI is reshaping our world, not just as a builder, but as a catalyst empowering others to build what’s next.
An Open Letter to Emerging Leader
To the next generation of builders, innovators, and leaders,
My most crucial advice is this: Embrace the unconventional path. Your greatest breakthroughs lie in the intersections where others hesitate.
The most powerful careers are rarely linear. Mine began in the precise world of engineering, designing chips with zero margin for error, before a pull toward the bigger picture led me from engineering to sales, from Google Cloud to high-growth startups, and from building products to leading business functions.
Each leap came before I felt ready and I learned there’s never a “perfect” time. Stepping into the CMO role at Yellow.ai, I faced immense challenge: launching into new markets, rebuilding the brand groundsup, and revamping the demand engine to land higher ACVs . There was no playbook, only action.
We defined a vision, created clarity, and executed with purpose, scaling and transforming the business. The feeling of being unready isn’t a stop sign, it’s the starting gun. The future belongs to leaders who bridge gaps and thrive amid uncertainty.
So raise your hand for what scares you most.
Your path is your own. Trust that it is in the leap, not the ledge, that you learn to fly.
With anticipation,
Surbhi Agarwal
Founder & CEO, Magdalena Capital
Former CMO, Applied Intuition
Key Takeaways:
- Evolve from having all the answers to asking the right questions that empower your team.
- Foster psychological safety to unlock creativity, risk-taking, and true innovation.
- Build multidisciplinary teams that bridge technical and business domains for a competitive edge.
- Replace rigid long-term plans with agile, scenario-based strategies to navigate dynamic markets.
- Leverage resilience and emotional intelligence as critical tools for leadership impact.
- Redefine marketing success by measurable business outcomes like pipeline and revenue, not just visibility.
