Brand

“I think in Silicon Valley we understand really well building the best product, but I think we underestimate the importance of brand. Then, a great brand with a shitty product goes nowhere. So first is product, but then you need to be able to build a brand that…”

“We do a survey every year. We go out to consumers, not to our com, our customers, and just say, you know, how do you feel about customer experience? And 30% of those consumers said, I will leave that brand if I have one bad experience.”

“Really what he's done is he's using that as a farm system to produce clips and content, and the content grows his brand, and he's going to make way more off his brand being famous than he is off those workshops in the end.”

“So distribution of an adequate product when the field is basically commodity distribution on brand become a big deal.”

“I learned a hard lesson that if you disappoint a consumer once, they're not just going to not try that 15th product, they'll stop buying your brand altogether.”

“Your brands don't matter as much as how modern you are in your ability to deliver product. In, in the past, I think for the last 10 years, it's like, have you seen the movie before? ... But now if every way of building software and how we deliver product is co…”

“If I had to bet, I'm going to bet that brands go to zero. Yeah, because I think that when you can make things that are as good or better, and you can make them in a cheaper, faster, better way, people want that abundance more than they want an affiliation to a…”

“We want the brands too, but the brands need to show up as brands. Like it's okay for them to say, we're here to sell you stuff. In fact, they do a lot better paid and organic. If they just tell the truth, I'm here to sell you something.”

“The moment that marketplace platform is built, then the engine is set. You can keep feeding selection into it. Pricing will get automatically discovered because all the sellers will be fighting with each other to get the cheapest price on the same product. Con…”

“It's very easy using the same tools that everybody else is using to end up in the same place. You have to be intentional about ending up in a different place. And so rather than start from What does the AI spit out? And then let's tweak that. I would start fro…”

“I think you will find that most brands that are really popular Particularly in their early days, they were kind of cults. They were cult cults, meaning they had a following, because I think most brands are ultimately built by the evangelist enthusiasts of thei…”

“In some ways, you could argue it's an ingenious marketing strategy, which is that you press the hot buttons of one percent of the population, so they then repeat your message accompanied by their own Signaling outrage. Meanwhile, you get free media coverage pr…”

“And those things don't really go away just because there is a better convenience of sort of like getting to the end answer.”

“The only thing that will save us is our brands and whether our brands and what we, the content we make resonates enough directly for people to recognize a brand and want to be brand involved rather than agnostic. I've, I believe Until the last breath, that bra…”

“I think the brands are going to become more important, right? I mean, I basically think that, like, all kind of economic theory assumes that people have access to perfect information. And I think the internet took us a step closer to that, and AI is going to t…”

“Brand again, 80% of buyers buy based on brand. Maybe actually, you know, 95% are influenced by brand and 80% by the market leader, the one or two choice.”

“What you typically see a lot of brands do is they're afraid of good ideas because good ideas have not been done by definition. So they lean more on the execution and you see like large budgets and like, Huge bloated teams and production.”

“And so when you look at what makes a human's identity and defining that, that's the best way to define a brand holistically. That's how I think about branding. It's like, it's a human being. You have to define it. Don't make it abstract. It's from its religion…”

“Ironically, as a brand person, I would say products more important than brand right now. Products all that matters actually brand secondary.”

“A hundred percent. So in the absence of God, you need affiliation. You need belonging and you need signals of status and brands are filling that void.”

“So those things could be very disruptive and lead to inflation, but current level, 30%, it feels like brands will mostly absorb that and not pass it. They'll pass it through a little bit, but it's, remember, this is 30% on the cost.”

“I think like brands are gonna have to shift so dramatically to doing other things because ads are gonna be commoditized.”

“So my hot take is the most defensible things 10 years from now will be your brand, workflows that require high trust and data.”

“Down in the follower count and what we call like the nano and the micro and these people with like two, three, four or 5000 followers and above you know, that's where you're seeing the highest performing content, the best return on, on investment for brands.”

“That would be the dream, but the reality is that there's too much competition out here with the brands, and they want to be guaranteed a payment, and if we're not gonna do it, another brand will.”

“It abstracts away a lot of companies' brand names, which I think is going to be very hard for an entire generation of Brands.”

“In a world where, you know, AI and vibe coding is only proliferating and making it easier to replicate products, brand is possibly one of the most powerful motes and defensible aspects of a business.”

“I think brand is actually more important than ever in a way, because there's sort of two modes of trust. There's trust based on utility, where it's functionally correct. It's, you know, factually accurate. It does the thing that you've intended it to do, and t…”

“We own the language by which they make the product. We have exclusive supplier relationships and brands are incredibly dependent on that and dependent on us, which allows us have a huge amount of leverage in that relationship.”

“It completely disintermediates brands. In a way that's pretty significant for the industry.”

“That's a way in which you can weave brands into culture. In a way that doesn't necessarily need to be ridiculous production value, a TV advert.”

“Much stronger. I think they're going to double down on that, and they're going to focus on it.”

“Loyalty is, would you pay extra? To stick with this, and if you wouldn't pay extra, then the brand has no value.”

“If you are building a company, and someone asks you about your brand, and what car your brand would be if it was a car, and you can't say, you don't have a strong enough brand.”

“I feel like people's color stories are something that, like, is an immediate, like, read, where if you blur your eyes and look at a brand, you can tell, you can recognize it by its color”

“A brand is so many things, like you can't pinpoint what it is, it's the name, it's the spirit, it's what you curate, it's how those things blend together, it's the models that you cast, it's the way you style it, it's the quality of the photography, it's the w…”

“No one follows brands. Everyone follows movements. Everyone follows like people.”

“A lot of brands really push their social mission, and I'm not convinced that that sells product. I think what sells a product is a good product.”

“Two placeholders is brand and culture. You may describe everything by brand, and you may describe everything by culture, but usually it doesn't have any sense, and you need to ask, Clarifying questions, because you always may say, our situation is bad because …”

“Being humble about your brand is not the way to go. You can be humble in your life, but don't be humble about in your brand. You have to brag because that's what consumers care about. That is what the press cares about.”

“The first and foremost thing is that brand isn't owned by marketing. Like I would be lying if I said that. And I also think it's disingenuous and probably like detrimental to how you think about brand at a company if you think marketing owns it. Brand is a sha…”

“I think they punish brands when they don't do what they say they're going to do, and they're not relevant to them.”

“Now there is not one private markets firm on the planet that doesn't believe that brand and story and being on the offense doesn't hit the bottom line. It creates efficiencies across this rubric we call talent, deals, and capital.”

“Part of their unique advantage is they were able to build a product where brands can onboard their existing retailers for free and not pay any commission, but they can manage that workflow. And then that allowed FAIR to cross sell those boutiques to other bran…”

“Because our brand is very well defined. Our values are very well defined. What we're doing is very well defined. So you don't have your strategy cannot change like drastically. Right? So it's a constant ongoing of improvements.”

“You don't have a brand when you're zero MRR. Like, you can do outrageous things with zero consequence, as far as I can tell. Like, The worst thing that happens is you just start over and everyone forgot what you were doing in the first place.”

“The switching costs for a brand working with an agency is very low. It's easy. The switching costs for an employee to an agency is it's very low as well.”

“But what I've seen is when you run ads at that scale, it only destroys your brand.”

“Brand is arguably the most powerful and least understood of the seven powers. It's so durable because of how Complicated, time-intensive, and lucky you have to be to build a brand.”

“Now, I will say that unlike some of the other powers, I do think brand is the one that takes the longest to build up, even with the acceleration of technology. I do think there's a max speed that trust and word of mouth spread can happen at, and it looks more …”

“I think the more interesting point as opposed to naming names is, I think brand is a very interesting, like not well discussed, not well understood, but probably the most potent currency in venture.”

“Yeah, I mean, I do think that the era of brands lasting 50 years are no more. Because of the internet and technology.”

“LLMs can be a source of differentiation. Today, they might provide a first-mover advantage, but old-fashioned modes like network effects, high switching costs, scale, and brand are still what will likely win long term.”

“Brands are the first to chicken out when you get cancelled, when you get pushed back.”

“Brand means you are getting, instead of a commodity of X rupees a kilo, you are getting X plus, you're getting a multiple. That's what the brand is all about. And you have to position the brand in a way that you can keep on getting that premium until when you …”

“And a brand is about trust, credibility, depth of connection. And that comes from some stuff that might not be optimized for the algorithm.”

“You have to focus on execution because in the early days, you know, nothing else matters. PR doesn't matter. Brand doesn't matter. You know, It just doesn't matter. You have to be focused on execution.”

“I have this new thesis. It's like a work in progress thesis. Curious your thoughts that every brand will have an alt account.”

“You almost get to build those deeper communities for free if you become more well-known at the top.”

“The future of brands are less serious brands. Like, I think that if you are really trying to optimize for connection and sales and Just getting the word out there, making fun of yourself a little bit is the way.”