The project built to stop treating revenue leaders like the company piñata.

Our Founder’s Story

In recent years, Pinyahta Founder and CEO Cody Gillund has seen something change. After two decades leading marketing in high-growth, high-pressure environments, she has watched a new pattern emerge.

Companies hire talented marketing, sales, and customer success leaders to drive growth, yet rarely give them the belief, authority, or resources to do it well. This has created a cycle of short tenures and misplaced blame that follows these leaders from role to role. The stigma has grown strong enough to reshape workplace culture itself, leaving revenue leaders entering environments where they are already under-equipped and misaligned.

For Cody, this reality became personal long before it became a mission.

Despite a strong track record of performance and impact, she was laid off twice in three years, including once shortly after welcoming her fourth child. She navigated pay cuts, unstable cultures, and environments that drained her mentally. Over time, she felt her confidence slipping and her love for her work eroding in ways that should never be considered normal.

In 2024, she began her entrepreneurial journey creating marketing consultancy Grounded Growth Studio, hoping to shift the stigma around marketing in a one-to-one setting. As she built the practice, she met dozens of leaders with the same story. Brilliant operators held publicly accountable for outcomes they were never structurally empowered to achieve. People motivated by meaningful work and strong collaboration, yet placed in cultures where urgency replaced alignment and burnout replaced support.

The more she listened, the clearer it became. The stories she heard from revenue leaders, and her marketing peers in particular, were not isolated. Their stories have power. Their experiences are the evidence. Their truth fuels change. And they are not alone.

After countless conversations with peers facing the same struggles, Cody saw the pattern for what it was: not individual failure but a systemic cultural shift that demanded something bigger.

So she built it.

Pinyahta for Marketing Leaders is the first step in a larger project to give revenue leaders the transparency, benchmarks, and community they need to thrive in organizations that genuinely support their function. It is a platform built to help marketing leaders select roles that are truly a good fit, navigate tough situations in the roles they are already in, and stop dreading Mondays.