Tilen Tkalec
Slovenian marketer working on growth and go-to-market. I run GTM at 8x and I'm CEO of eMatura.
Most of my marketing runs on AI agents I built myself: reporting across four markets, content, influencer scouting and the monthly close.
Work
- 8x GTM and paid acquisition across 8x's apps. 2026 – now
- eMatura CEO. Exam prep for 30,000+ students in Slovenia, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria. 2026 – now
- Citorra An agency that gets brands cited in ChatGPT and Google's AI answers. Building
- Aleph Pinterest account manager. $20M+ in ad spend for global brands. 2023 – 2026
- Earlier: a bank, a performance agency, Big Bang and e2grow.
Things I believe
- Be AI-native, not AI-curious. A two-person growth team with the right agents now does the work of six. The hard part is having opinions sharp enough to give an agent clean instructions.
- Taste is the moat, process isn't. If you can write a decision down as a rule, an agent will do it better within a year. The part you can't write down is the only part that was ever yours.
- Take the 1% shot. Being unqualified is a reason to move faster, not to sit it out.
- Walk into the rooms you don't think you belong in. Your baseline becomes the room's baseline. It's why I'm spending this autumn in San Francisco instead of at my desk in Ljubljana.
- Attention is the scarce resource. Agents made my work faster and me slower until I stopped watching them. Run the agents side by side, and keep one problem at a time for yourself.
Outside work I stay active: gym, Muay Thai, skiing, hiking and climbing. The rest goes to books, travel and time with my fiancée, family and friends.
If you work on growth, GTM, paid social or AI search, I'm happy to compare notes. A LinkedIn message is the fastest way to reach me.