As Corporate Natalie, she’s become a social media celeb. She’s still not moving to L.A.  

Two years into her digital side hustle, Natalie Marshall had one of the most surreal experiences of her life: An HR company flew her to Kansas City to film a series of commercials on a set that fully replicated her Nob Hill bedroom, down to the specific Ikea lampshade. 

But the elaborate getup wasn’t technically for Marshall. Instead, it was built for her social media persona, Corporate Natalie, which she’s parlayed into a six-figure annual business, according The Standard’s estimates.

“I was emotional,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘What’s happening? Is this real life?’” 

The 27-year-old has encountered many such pinch-me moments since she started posting TikTok videos during 2020’s pandemic lockdowns, many poking fun at work-from-home culture or the clichés of the corporate slog. She had plenty of fodder from her daily life as a Deloitte consultant, from trying to block her unmade bed from a Zoom call to the typical barrage of business lingo in a meeting. 

In a matter of weeks, her account ticked up to 10,000 followers, then 25,000, then 50,000. When she got an email from Dell, she initially assumed it was a phishing attempt. Her parents, who live in Menlo Park where she grew up, had to push her to respond.

Turns out, it wasn’t a scam. She’d long considered influencers to be “kind of cringe,” but realized then that her social media side project could mean real money: “This wasn’t Sugar Bear Hair Gummies, like I’d seen all the influencers I’d followed doing,” she said. “This was a real B2B company. So that was the moment I really decided to go for it.”

She’s since built her networks to more than a million followers on Instagram, 700,000 on TikTok, and nearly 90,000 on LinkedIn, ensnaring an audience of mostly millennial women with her all-too-real depictions of work crushes, aggravating bosses, over-the-top coworkers, and the cross-generational divide. 

In person, she’s as enthusiastic and type A as the characters she sometimes portrays. Her bedroom-slash-office is meticulously clean and monochromatic (even her big Stanley water bottle is bright white). There are black-and-white photos and a candle that smells like “two weeks’ notice.”

While she’ll spin exaggerations for laughs in both her videos and real life (at one point she describes a tech company CEO as like “the second coming of Christ”), her skits land because they all contain a kernel of truth, whether about silly corporate rituals, telling white lies, or how your work bestie might actually give you terrible advice.

“We love poking fun at this insanely professional and guarded space that we spend so much of our time in,” she said. “I love bringing to light the thoughts that everyone is thinking but is too afraid to say.” 

Ironically, Corporate Natalie’s success has freed Marshall from her own nine-to-five grind: In mid-2022, she quit her job after realizing she could make more money by focusing on her brand full-time. She’s now able to pay herself and a full-time employee through sponsorship deals, comedy shows, startup advising, and a virtual assistant company focused on creators, which she founded with one of her three roommates.

“I spent so long pretending to be my own assistant, and then had my roommate pretend to be my assistant,” she said. Past masquerading as a secretary for clout, the duo now connects other social media stars with trained backup to help with contract negotiation and staving off burnout.    

Marshall also cohosts a podcast with another local influencer, “Corporate Bro,” aka Ross Pomerantz. She and Pomerantz became friends and collaborators after filming a business jargon romance video in 2022. 

“No week is the same,” she said, showing off her calendar, meticulously color-coded to distinguish live appearances, acting gigs, podcast recording, and, of course, filming and posting her Corporate Natalie skits. (To stay sane, she records a bunch of different videos twice a week, so that she has skits backlogged and doesn’t “wake up with this dark cloud of content pressure hanging over me,” Marshall said.)

Mostly, she loves her job, but it does have its downsides: “I get a performance review every single day, 24 hours a day, whether I like it or not,” she said. “I receive comments about my appearance, my voice, how I’m so unfunny. … As much positivity as there is, that’s hard to receive every single day.”

The constant stream of “feedback” from strangers is part of the reason she keeps her real life and her social media persona separate. Aside from filming in her actual bedroom, Marshall rarely shares glimpses of her friends or hobbies, and her boyfriend is, blessedly, extremely offline. 

Over the coming years, she hopes to take her content from social media feeds to bigger screens (she has a Roku show on the horizon, for example). While San Francisco is better known for “angel investors and startup founders” oversharing on LinkedIn than the kind of influencer she’s become, Marshall has no interest in chasing the content creator zeitgeist and decamping to L.A. (or joining a “hype house”). “This is home to me,” she said. 

And even though she’s abandoned the corporate ladder for now, she’s still fighting against aggressive office policies, meetings that could have been emails, and the frustrations of corporate chauvinism. 

“I had one senior manager who told me to stop trying so hard, and that motivated me to try even harder,” she said. “Never tell a woman to stop trying so hard.”