The Category Creator
Chris Elsheikhi is VP Demand Generation at Usercentrics, the consent management platform. Eighteen years of building categories before the market was ready, across on-demand transport at Gett, creator commerce at Spring, and privacy-led marketing at Usercentrics.
“Selling things to people they don’t know they need yet.”
Chris Elsheikhi has spent eighteen years turning categories from novelty into necessity. On-demand taxi booking in the UK before Uber launched. Creator commerce on YouTube and Instagram when creators were still shy about selling. Consent as a performance metric, now, inside the privacy-led marketing era. Each move has followed the same pattern: arrive before the market knows it wants the thing, and educate it into adoption.
Elsheikhi’s first chapter was music. For six and a half years he ran Bainbridge Music in Edinburgh, a chain of recording and rehearsal studios with an artist management and promotion arm. The roster booked Glastonbury slots and earned BBC radio airplay. He raised capital from private investors, the Scottish Youth Business Trust and Creative Scotland; supported Mercury Music Prize winners on their early records; and won government funding to support young people in creative pursuits.
He moved to Gett as UK General Manager in 2015, launching the on-demand taxi app across UK cities outside London as Uber was preparing its own launch. The business he built reached eight figures of revenue within the first year and five million pounds across three cities. In 2017 he relocated to Los Angeles to join Spring, the creator commerce platform formerly known as Teespring. As VP Revenue he drove global revenue from 90 million dollars to 160 million, built a 40-person globally dispersed team, closed deals up to 15 million dollars ACV, and led the go-to-market for the YouTube Merchshelf and Instagram Shopping integrations, bringing two million new customers a year through the partner ecosystem.
Based in Lisbon since 2022, he spent three and a half years as a fractional CMO, CRO and GTM leader for pre-revenue and early-stage startups through his own consultancy, Chris E Revenue, collectively helping clients cross more than 500 million dollars in revenue. He is also a mentor at Startup Lisboa. In November 2025 he joined Usercentrics as VP Demand Generation, where his work now centres on a single thesis: that consent is the new performance metric, and trust the new marketing.
“Three percent of LinkedIn users post three times a week.”
“Selling things to people that they don’t know they need yet, but they desperately do.”
Elsheikhi frames his career as a pattern of market education. On-demand taxi booking in the UK when a phone-booked taxi was still a novelty. Creator commerce when YouTubers were still worried about over-monetising fans. Privacy-led marketing now, inside a consent banner, where trust is the new signal. Each category required convincing customers that a thing they had not been missing was about to become indispensable.
“Controversial take: you need the resources behind you. One marketing mistake can wipe out a million-dollar-ARR company.”
After three and a half years of fractional GTM work with Lisbon startups, Elsheikhi’s opinion is less romantic than the founder-mythology version. Bootstrapping is admirable and sometimes achievable; more often, a single mis-fired campaign ends a sub-10-million-dollar-ARR company. Founders chasing hyper-growth should build the capital stack first and the growth engine second, and should protect the margin for error that cash provides.
“When a customer consents, they’re offering you all their data. That’s the cleanest signal you can optimise for.”
Usercentrics’s 10,000-respondent study found that on average platforms such as Google and Meta see only 60 percent of a brand’s conversion data. The other 40 percent is filled by modelled attribution, which Elsheikhi regards as one of the bigger quiet errors in current demand gen. Consent rate is, in his framing, the truest signal of marketing health in the post-cookie era: a customer comfortable enough to opt in has already chosen you.
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