Not Every Founder Should Be the Face of Their Brand

In March this year, Deepinder Goyal’s new wearable startup, Temple, made headlines for the wrong reason. Reports surfaced that the company was using body fat percentage as a hiring criterion, and within a day, the story wasn’t about the product anymore. It was about what kind of company would think that was a good idea, and more specifically, about Goyal himself.

That’s the part of founder-led branding nobody puts in the pitch deck. The advice founders hear constantly is to post more, be visible, build a personal brand. It has become such a default recommendation that almost nobody stops to ask whether founder visibility actually fits the business in question.

When does founder visibility actually work?

There are real situations where putting a founder forward is a genuine advantage, not just a vanity exercise.

This tends to be true when a business is trying to:

1. 1

   Build credibility in a category it hasn’t earned yet. A young D2C brand with no name recognition can borrow trust from a founder willing to put their face and reasoning on the line. Ghazal Alagh did exactly this with Mamaearth, building the brand’s early credibility around her own story as a new mother looking for safer products for her child.

2. 2

   Explain something complicated. A fintech or healthcare founder with a strong, honest point of view on their space often becomes a more useful voice than any amount of company messaging could. Nithin Kamath has done this for Zerodha, using his own commentary on markets and investing to build more trust in the brand than any advertising campaign could.

3. 3

   Attract the right investors or senior hires. People back people before they back companies, especially early on. Ritesh Agarwal’s own visibility as a young, ambitious founder helped OYO attract global investors and senior leadership well before the company had the scale to earn that attention on numbers alone.

In each of these cases, the founder isn’t promoting the business so much as contributing something to a conversation that already exists.

When it becomes a risk?

The flip side rarely gets discussed with the same seriousness. Nikhil Kamath’s comment about MBA graduates earlier this year is a useful example. It wasn’t a company statement, it was one line on a podcast, but within hours it had become a referendum on him, and by extension, on everything he’s built.

The more closely a founder’s reputation is tied to the company, the more that company inherits every risk attached to the founder, a controversial remark, a personal reputation issue, even something as ordinary as a leadership transition down the line.

This is exactly the bind Temple found itself in. A wearable health brand barely out of the gate, already being defined by a hiring controversy that had very little to do with the product itself.

There’s also a quieter cost. Founders who post constantly without a clear point of view don’t build authority, they build noise. Visibility and influence aren’t the same thing. A founder can have a large following and still have almost no pull with the people who actually matter to the business.

Three questions worth asking first

Before building out a personal branding strategy, it helps to get more specific than “should I be posting.”

1. 1

   Does this visibility solve an actual business problem, whether that’s category credibility, investor trust, or talent attraction?

2. 2

   Is there a subject I can speak on with real authority, something that holds up under scrutiny?

3. 3

   What happens to this brand the day I’m no longer the one speaking for it?