⊹ the circe brief ⊹
A week ago, I got on Twitter. I learned a couple things:
X is a scary place
Corgi girls are a thing
Grown men have a lot of feelings about women taking selfies
I’d heard about the Corgi girls the way you hear about a friend of a friend’s drama. Then I made an X account and it was all over my feed. Then Georgia Witchel’s essay blew up the sf tech internet, and it became impossible not to address what’s happening.
But everyone is arguing about the Corgi girls and a lot of people don’t even know what they do. So before we tell you what we think, let’s break it down.
wtf is a “corgi girl”
Corgi is a YC-backed AI insurance company. Not a scam, they raised a real Series B with a unicorn valuation as of May. They’ve also established a gtm strategy to run 24/7 cafés for founders (SF, New York, and now Shoreditch), run free buses around YC, and to have a cute company dog named Trudy.
They also hire pretty, young, chronically online women to do marketing, growth, and events. If you’re on X, you’ve probably seen it: A girl moves to SF, mirror selfie, bulleted intro: 22, new here, any recs?, joined a run club. Everyone assumes she works at Corgi, even though plenty of these girls work somewhere else entirely (Georgia’s essay has examples going back to the spring). The format existed before Corgi, but they’ve hired so many of these women at once that the whole trend got their name.
And there’s A LOT of Corgi girls posting. There’s an internal leaderboard, which they posted publicly, ranking their own people by weekly impressions. And there’s a stated theory behind all of it: being front page of X every day beats the New York Times, because on X you control the story and you’re directly in front of founders, capital allocators, and insurance customers.
The top name on that leaderboard: Brooke LeBlanc, Head of Community and self-crowned Chief Corgi Girl Officer. She’s been on Twitter since 2011. Fifteen years of being extremely online, the output shows it: she posted 130 times in one week and generated 1.4 million impressions. Georgia priced tech Twitter around a $48 CPM. Run the math on that week and you get roughly $67,000 of media value. From one employee, in seven days. Georgia’s hypothetical, a whole team of five posting twice a week, penciled out to a $138K marketing budget. One Brooke gets you half of that in a week. Add an army of Corgi girls and your GTM is golden.
So yes. The strategy works. Corgi, an insurance company, is the most talked-about brand in tech, and a handful of iPhones is out-producing entire marketing departments.
the corgi a/b test
From Brooke’s own feed:
On August 7, Corgi announced three café launches with a photo of three Corgi girls in I♥NY shirts: 268,000 views.
On August 21, Brooke announced two café launches with text and a photo of the dog: 2,500 views.
She plugged the same company and product, two weeks apart. With the women in the picture, the announcement traveled a 100x further.
Her single cheapest reach that week was nine words, no image: “who wants to cofound the rest of my life with me?” 37,000 views. A dating post written in tech native language. But when she posted her actual professional thesis, that a Corgi girl’s job is to make momentum, it got 7,000 views. When she tried to retire the Corgi Girl joke entirely, 771 people saw it.
So the numbers tell a story. 3 Corgi girls: 268K views. “Let’s date”: 37K. The product alone: 2.5K. Her talking about her job like a marketer: three digits.
I doubt anybody at Corgi said: let’s run the “post about wanting a boyfriend” playbook. But that’s what the algorithm rewards, and Brooke reads the feed faster than anyone else in this city.
are people on X ok?
Everyone keeps asking whether this strategy is degrading, but that’s not really the thing that bugs us.
What’s annoying is that this strategy operates under the assumption that anyone with any purchasing power in startups is a thirsty man on X.
But 2/3 users on X are men, and the gap has widened every year since 2023 (hi, Elon). A third of its users work in tech, media, or finance. Founders are mostly men (around 2% of VC dollars go to all-women teams, and the headcount numbers aren’t much happier). Corgi didn’t assume its buyers were men; they counted. And building an entire GTM campaign around that count is what breaks our little hearts, especially because Corgi is a female-founded company(!)
The reaction is disheartening.
A startup founder built a website out of the corgi girl’s scraped LinkedIn photos to rank their “hotness” (Guess we’re back to the early facebook days). It lasted three days before Corgi’s lawyers killed it, but the the darkest part was that people believed Corgi had built it themselves. Old friends texted Erika Lee, Corgi’s head of brand, to ask if it was one of their bits. That’s what X users think when they see this kind of stunt on the platform.
And X isn’t just hostile. For every reply guy explaining that this isn’t real value creation, there’s a guy tweeting that we need more Corgi girls than doctors. The girls answer both the same way, with a bit. Adoring fans and hostile trolls get identical treatment, because to the algorithm they’re identical. It’s all impressions.
And people are copying this playbook. Celeste Amadon, CEO and cofounder of Known, posted a hiring call with a car selfie and did 42K. The Corgi feed cheerfully wondered how many war rooms are studying their playbook right now. Now we have a daily official Hot List™ declaring who’s “hot” in sf.
it’s giving Sydney Sweeney
We’re not saying there’s gonna be a Corgi Girl™ bath water soap coming out anytime soon. But the strategy of using a woman as an ad to sell to the male gaze is looking oddly… familiar.
Claire Vo, said it best: appearance is one of the few disproportionate levers young women get in an industry that’s otherwise hostile to them. The Chief Corgi Girl Officer herself has written that she figured out in her early teens that people listened to her more when she cared about her looks. She’s 29 now. That’s14 years of knowing pulling on this lever.
But she’s not the only one. Every woman in the Bay, including us, pulls on this at some point. When you exists in rooms where a 14% female population is considered a positive thing, you really don’t have a choice but to code-switch into pick-me or a tech bro once in a while to get the intro, the check, the job. Most of us aren’t posting about it, and sometimes we feel icky about it.
But the Corgi girls’ job is to do it out loud, on main, with a public leaderboard.
The difference is Sydney gets north of $10M for being loud about it.
so how do we feel about it
TL;DR: We’re torn.
And we’ve decided that that’s the most honest take we can give, and we’re likely staying torn.
Circe exists to get capital into women’s hands. These women are getting their bag. They own audiences, titles, a public case for their own value (1.4 million impressions a week is a number you bring to a negotiation).
“Everything is a power law”, was Brooke’s caption under that leaderboard pic, posted from the number one spot. We love watching women sit at number one. We want them to win so badly.
And yet.
The same evidence that proves they’re winning proves what they’re winning at. The café announcement without the selfie is invisible; so are the competence posts. The dating posts are viral. They’re not selling in this economy unless there’s a selfie attached. So they’re not the sellers, they’re the ad. And the ad only works because the buyers are assumed to be men.
We noticed that there’s three camps amongst the women depending on when they entered the industry.
Women 40+ spent decades fighting to not be the booth bunny, and they’re watching this and hearing the ground crack.
Women 30+ feel triggered and guilty about feeling triggered.
And Gen Z has already published its verdict, per Georgia’s essay: being hot and socially fluent is a sales skill, the critics are incels, move on. She’s not wrong either; you can’t run an ecosystem that tells women visibility is an asset and then treat them as suspect when the asset appreciates. Especially when San Francisco seems to be more and more obsessed with hotness every day. (We’re looking at you, Known)
And somewhere, a new grad girl is looking at a 42K hiring post, concluding that being hot and having an audience is what a career in startups growth requires. And maybe that is what it requires, but we can’t help but feel sad about it.
the one thing we’re not torn about
Everyone’s arguing about whether it’s degrading. Georgia’s essay, 1.1 million views and counting, lands on “maybe be nice to the corgi girls.” We want to raise the stakes.
Visibility is an asset, sure. So who holds the asset?
One Corgi girl generates roughly $67K of media value a week. Corgi raised at $1.3 billion. The copycat companies will hire new grads at new grad salaries to run Brooke’s playbook, and most of them will land at the bottom of the power law.
So here’s the only advice in this brief:
Pull a Sydney: get compensated.
If your brand is going to be the reason the announcement does 268K instead of 2.5K, make sure you own a piece of what its selling, and you better be getting paid accordingly. The selfie depreciates, but the equity and audience compounds. The women at the top of this playbook already act like they know this: Brooke openly campaigns for a Forbes 30 Under 30 nomination, got her side project written up in Inc, runs a Substack, and takes work inquiries through her own bio like a creator. The attention flows through Corgi, but the assets are accruing to her. Girls in growth: take notes!
And Corgi girls, if you don’t have equity, start protesting now. You are the Corgi brand; you should own a large chunk of it.
We want the bag in your hands, and we want a room where this isn’t the fastest way to get it. Both things at once. But for now, we’re just happy that women are getting their bag.
-Isa and Anna ⊹
upcoming events
Next Week!
sept 10 | gtm after dark | RSVP
⊹
oct 5 | lucy guo tech week masquerave | RSVP
⊹
⊹
jobs by female founders
Founding GTM Lead — Adaption Labs, SF
Founding Engineer roles — Kita, SF
Open roles — Niural (HR/payroll, 25+ positions)
Chief of Staff — Soma Health, reach out to founder Jiali directly
new circe merch
We have some news: Circe has merch! if you're interested in rocking the Circe brand, check out our shop here. Yearly subscribers to the Circe platform get a free “Claude is a Woman” sweatshirt, in case you needed a little extra incentive to join us :)
That’s all from us this week! We’re so happy to have you follow long in our journey, and if you want to officially be part of our community, you can apply here.
