I used to be popular... now I'm just productive.
For a long time, I used to think that the more I built my personal brand, the more successful my startup would become. I spent countless hours at networking events, speaking gigs, and 5 nights per week doing dinners to expand my network. At the time, I was awfully popular.
Then one day, during my millionth speaking event, one of my investors pulled me aside. He said, very bluntly, "WTF are you doing here? I invested in your startup, and all I see is you showing up at every networking event doing speeches. Why aren't you back in your office building a company?"
He was right. While I was busy building my personal brand, what I wasn't doing was building my startup. Yes, more people knew about my startup because of my efforts, but it had zero impact on the success of that startup. A year later, my startup died.
### The Attention Trap
That story was almost 20 years ago, long before social media and influencers. But today the distraction is exactly the same. We fall into the attention trap where we are so hell bent for the world's attention and validation that we forget that the goal wasn't "likes" and "comments" — it was revenue and profit.
What confused me early in my career was thinking that attention meant progress. I thought that if everyone was constantly high-fiving my progress — investors, colleagues, customers — that it must mean I'm doing something right. It felt good, so I kept doing it. And the more I did it, the more high fives I got. I was digging my own grave, and I didn't even know it.
A big reason that it's easy for us to fall into this trap is that what we do is wrought with insecurity — lots of it. We're building something that's never been done, with experience that we probably don't have, with an outcome that has zero certainty. Of course, we want some validation!
### The Focus Tax
But that validation and popularity, while it feels great, extracts a tremendous tax - our time and focus. It's not complicated. We're either spending that moment doing super important work toward building our company, or we're racking our brains to think of some clever social post. That energy gets taxed.
While some level of external publicity is important for building a brand, there's a point where we're not brand-building anymore. We're simply attention-seeking at the cost of our startup. That's dangerous.
It also compounds on itself. The more popular we get, the more inputs we need to manage. At some point, we find ourselves applying a "how will this look externally?" filter to everything that we do, instead of just asking "What's the best decision for our business?"
### Building the Wrong Brand
There's nothing wrong with building a personal brand, so long as it's not at the expense of our startup. That's a hard balance to achieve when the effort to remain popular and relevant becomes substantial. Ask any prominent influencer what it takes to stay at the top of their game, and no one will say "no time at all." That's because it's an endless, rapidly growing torrent of time.
That's time we could be spending doing product development, customer outreach, recruiting, or fundraising. Every minute invested in those categories is going to have infinitely more rewards than raising our own profile, at least for the startup.
If we're absolutely sold that we need to get external, at least let's focus on what's important — our startup's brand. There's no version where we have a huge outcome because our personal brand was so great, but our startup sucked wind. Trust me, I tried.
### Popularity Fades, Progress Compounds
These days, I focus on building my startup first, and then building my popularity if and when I get around to it. The result is predictable — fewer people know who I am, but a whole lot more people know who my startup is, which is all I care about.
What I didn’t realize back then was that popularity doesn’t just waste time — it rewires our motives. We start making choices for how they’ll look instead of what they’ll do. The product becomes a prop. The mission becomes marketing. Once that happens, we’re not leading a company anymore — we’re managing a performance.
It took losing that company to relearn what real work feels like. It’s quiet. It’s unglamorous. It’s full of doubt and discipline. But that’s where the actual magic happens — in the parts no one sees.
That’s where companies are built, where ideas become real, and where Founders trade validation for value.
In Case You Missed It
What If The Founder's Personality Is A Startup's Liability? During the early days of my first startup, I stumbled upon a huge liability that was killing us quickly — me.
If We Want Power, Create Power A lot of us are used to hearing people telling us what we should and shouldn't do, what we can and cannot achieve — just because these people have tried it or have been in a similar situation. What they don't realize, is what works for them may not work for you, and vice versa.
Why Are All My Founder Friends Ahead of Me? Sometimes, we look at the success of others and immediately think we’re falling behind. Remember, success is a process, and we go through it in different phases.