The Struggle Bus: Chloe Pascal, Quiet Confidence in the Age of Chaos
Season 2 Episode Review
The Struggle Bus: Chloe Pascal, Quiet Confidence in the Age of Chaos
Season 2 Review
Season 2 of the Struggle Bus uncovered simialr qaulities across all guests. Most are self aware by default, giving them the ability to pause, reflect and rethink. As I review the epsidoes for you, I try to pick out what is useful, to you, the reader. First up, Chloe Pascal - Global Head of Marketing, Podcast host, ICF certified Coach For Nosto.
Who Is Chloe Pascal?
If you asked central casting for “European tech marketer working in New York,” they’d probably send you someone loud, someone who’d describe their brand as “disruptive” without a hint of irony. Chloe Pascal is not that person.
Chloe is French, raised in France, forged over 12 years in London, now based in New York leading the global marketing team at Nosto, an e-commerce experience platform serving over 1,500 customers across 100 countries. She’s someone who has done the inner work, therapy, mindfulness, years of unpicking imposter syndrome and anxiety, and brought those tools directly into how she leads. There’s no separation between the personal operating system and the professional one. They’re the same thing.
She also has a podcast of her own and an ancestral refuge in Lozère, (highly recommend looking this place up - WOW>) one of the most remote and rural parts of southern France, where she retreats for six weeks every summer thanks to Nosto’s remote working policy. Think of it as her hard reset button, the anti-New York, the anti-Slack notification. It’s where the world gets simpler. It seems this simplicity fuels everything she brings back to work.
How Does She Think?
Chloe operates on a principle that’s deceptively simple and maddeningly difficult to actually execute: slow down when everything wants to go fast.
It’s a deliberate, practised discipline that she’s built over a decade. When her late twenties hit her with anxiety and imposter syndrome, she didn’t just ride it out, she got curious. She sought to understand it. That curiosity became a loop: the more she discovered, the more she realised she didn’t know, which made her more curious. It’s the kind of virtuous cycle that changes not just how you feel, but how you show up for other people.
In leadership, this manifests as active listening, and she means the real kind, not the corporate training kind. The kind where you genuinely resist the urge to build your response while someone else is still talking. She described it perfectly:
“Active listening is something that is super critical, where you’re really listening to what someone is saying and you’re not building an idea of what they are going to say next, which is kind of hard to do because we always have like things that come up when someone starts to speak and we already make a judgment.”
It also shows up in how she runs her team. She recently led a three-day workshop built entirely around collaboration, not presentations. Small groups, mixed seniority, brainstorming by theme. Her role? Hold the space. Create psychological safety. And crucially, she’s learned from getting it wrong before:
“I used to push the team too hard and I used to make them work too many hours and build too many things and they were just exhausted after day one and it was three days, and I was like, ‘Please don’t do this again.’”
That kind of honesty about past mistakes is rare in leadership conversations. Most people polish that story into “I learned to be more mindful of energy.” Chloe just tells you she ran her team into the ground and fixed it.
How It Shapes Nosto’s Marketing
Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone in e-commerce marketing or working with tech vendors. Nosto’s marketing has a distinctly un-shouty quality to it. In an industry where everyone’s the “number one AI-powered personalisation platform,” Nosto leans into something closer to humility. Chloe credits the Finnish heritage of the company, Finnish people, she says, are humble, hard-working, and smart, and that DNA runs through the brand.
But there’s also clearly a Chloe imprint. Her philosophy on marketing is refreshingly blunt:
“I believe in building a strong identity and strong marketing so I don’t want my marketing to be called ‘bullshit.’ That’s not what we’re trying to flex, you know, ‘We’re the best in the world.’ It’s just like, okay, what exactly, who are we, and what do we do, who do we do this for?”
That’s a line you can laminate and stick on the wall of every marketing department in SaaS. In a world drowning in vaporwave buzzwords and “agentic” everything, asking “who are we, what do we do, who do we do this for?” is almost radical.
The way Nosto builds its annual plan is also worth noting. It’s a three-phase cycle: commercial first (gathering market feedback), then product (building the roadmap from commercial insights plus product data), then marketing (building on both). It means marketing is never operating from a vacuum, it’s the last layer on a foundation of customer reality. And throughout the year, multiple members of the marketing team have weekly touchpoints with commercial, CSM, and product teams. It’s cross-functional by design, not by accident.
The State of E-Commerce: My Takeaways
Chloe had some sharp observations about where our (I realised that I usually say it abstractly, like “the industry”. industry stands right now, particularly around AI readiness. These are worth passing on to your teams:
On the AI knowledge gap:
“Only maybe 10% of them actually understand a little bit what’s going on with agentic AI. There is so much education and learning to do, and same for us as well. We are learning as we go to some extent.”
(My response: “I think the 10% number probably feels a little bit high.” Which tells you everything about where the market actually is.I am a pessimist I think.)
On the coming turbulence:
“I think we’re going to go through bad years before it gets good. So I do believe that it’s a bit of a difficult period right now for a lot of people because with the innovation that AI is bringing, there’s lots of traditional ways of doing things that are going to be challenged.”
On the mindset divide:
“If you fear that AI is going to replace you, you probably going to not get where you need. If you are excited about AI and you embrace innovation and you realize your job is just going to evolve and actually you can just make a difference by using so many cool stuff.”
On the talk-to-action gap:
“Talking to some of my peers, you also realize that many people in tech generally speaking, they are not doing much although they are talking a lot about AI and agentic AI. They haven’t implemented that much; it’s still like very experimental. So there is a huge opportunity for people that just really want to embrace that.”
That last one is the real takeaway. The gap between talking about AI and actually implementing it is the competitive moat right now. The opportunity isn’t in knowing more, it’s in doing more.
The Career Song Question (Sort Of)
When asked what song her career would be right now, Chloe asked to answer differently. And what she gave was better than any song choice:
“At this moment in my career, I think what I’m feeling is... it’s weird because I’m feeling a lot of confidence. It’s like a quiet confidence with so much unknown. Probably the most unknown that I’ve ever felt in my life. And I think that what I love watching and like realizing is that even though there’s this unknown, I feel so strong and confident about what’s going to unfold, even though I don’t know what that is.”
“Before, you know, six, seven years ago, this would have led to so much anxiety for me. And right now I feel very cool about the fact that I’m not too sure what’s going to happen in the next three to six months.”
The ability to hold uncertainty without it becoming anxiety is arguably the most valuable skill in e-commerce right now. Nobody knows what the next 12 months look like. The question is whether that terrifies you or energises you.
Her Parting Wisdom
“While we embrace for AI, I think we also need to make sure we connect very closely to our human side... I would really focus on like listening, slowing down, understanding what’s happening for you, connecting with people. If you are not in a community, finding your community, spending time with real people so you don’t feel like you have such a crazy disconnect and only have to work.”
The Bottom Line
Chloe Pascal is a marketer who has done something unusual: she’s built her professional toolkit from the inside out. The mindfulness practice informs the active listening. The active listening informs the team dynamics. The team dynamics inform the marketing. And the marketing, refreshingly, doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.
In a world where every tech vendor is screaming “AI-FIRST!” from the rooftops, there’s something compelling about someone who says, essentially: slow down, listen, know who you are, and don’t call your own marketing bullshit.
For anyone feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change right now, Chloe’s message is both grounding and challenging: the chaos is real, the opportunity is real, and the people who will thrive are the ones who can hold both of those truths simultaneously, with quiet confidence.
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I have been lucky enough to have had partners who give me the licence to roam without asking for much in return. During these series, I want to mention them as I review the episodes.
Omnisend - an ever present for over 12 months now. A team who seemingly enjoy Irish Poitin and I think it clouds their judgement too :)
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