From Faceless Brand to Founder Fame
As trust in traditional institutions wanes and social media reigns, authentic personal brands now hold the keys to influence in business and beyond. Here’s why founders must lead from the front
A video of the Clafiya founder, Jennie, relaunching her startup as a Health Savings Account (HSA), caught my eye recently. In it she spurns the traditional approach of hiring paid actors and instead acts as the model for her own startup’s product.
Jennie gets it. In today’s world, if you’re a founder or business leader without a strong public persona, you’re already behind. The age of faceless institutions is over—people want authenticity, personality, and direct access to the individuals behind the brands they engage with. Billionaires, politicians, and business leaders have figured this out, using social media to amplify their influence, shape narratives, and even close deals.
Elon Musk exemplifies this shift. His $100 billion takeover offer for OpenAI was publicly rebuffed by Sam Altman, to which Musk responded with a single word post on X: “Swindler.” He later doubled down, calling Altman “scam Altman” in a captioned video of Altman being questioned in Congress about his financial ties to OpenAI. Weeks earlier, after Trump announced a landmark $500 billion “Stargate” project to advance AI infrastructure, Musk dismissed it on X: “They don’t actually have the money.” What followed was a most remarkable exchange between some of the wealthiest men in the world that left onlookers like me bewildered.
These men were publicly bickering over staggering sums of money and monumental tectonic shifts in technology (policy) that are set to usher in a new age of human advancement, on a social media app! The same app where comedic memes are exchanged in friendly banter and petty intercountry digital disputes over beauty pageant contestants are orchestrated. Clearly the rules of engagement in the public domain have changed. We’re firmly in the age of personalities where individuals and sincerity thrive over institutions and tact. A decade ago this was not the case.
Back in 2014, the sitting American president was decorous and not given to much levity. Experts of all forms were revered and institutions still held sway. Ubiquitous social media was nascent, its adoption accelerating and influence gaining significant ground. Its incredible power became apparent when President Trump emerged on the U.S electoral scene for the first time in 2018 and rode to victory on the back of twitter and the strength of his own personality over his party’s. He lost re-election but staged a daring return to the political summit, winning re-election in 2024. His unlikely political trajectory demonstrated that Trump himself was as big a brand as, if not bigger than, his own republican party. Central to the power of his personality was his excellent use of social and new media. His larger than life personality and propensity for succinct soundbites meant the algorithms lapped him up and vaunted him to prominence. Traditional media, now relegated to the background, couldn’t compete with ubiquitous well targeted social media, themselves, in fact, now sourcing news from social media. A true ode to the Trumpian refrain of, “You are the media now”
This evolution towards personalities coincided with the erosion of trust in institutions and experts seen particularly during Covid. Further paving the way for the cult of personality to take premier position as the most valuable voice. The world’s richest man not to be left behind played into this emerging opportunity. His presence on Twitter has reportedly contributed to Tesla spending significantly less on marketing than they otherwise would. He believed in the power of tweeting so much that he bought Twitter and took it private. Since then, his public persona and stock has soared all the way to leading him to becoming a trusted Trump advisor and czar at DOGE, a new U.S cost-cutting agency. Similar to Musk and in fact presaged by the legendary Steve Jobs, many business personalities now have a bigger voice and public following than the brands they lead. Even so in traditionally conservative industries like banking. Nigerian banking billionaire, Tony Elumelu has 2 million Instagram followers and posts regularly, his bank United Bank for Africa has less than a quarter of his following. African politicians, the usual laggards, aren’t left behind this time. Kagame, the Rwandan president unabashedly threatened Ramaphosa with war directly on X. The petty digital intercountry squabbles have left the stable of beauty pageants and social media warriors and into the territory of political players who possess power to create and inflame real world conflicts.
It’s no coincidence that Influencer marketing has been on an upward trend in the last decade growing from an estimated $2 billion spent in 2016 to a projected $24 billion spend in 2024. Musk and Elumelu are essentially influencers doing marketing for their own brands for a fraction of what it would cost otherwise. What does this mean for founders? It means the old era of a strong brand being led by a generic company voice is no longer sufficient. People want personalities, they want a face, they want a character they can relate to, they want authenticity and realness. After all, 'We are all the media now,' so only those with ‘something to hide’ will avoid public scrutiny on social media. I’ve seen this myself as I’ve built my social media following to over 35,000 followers over the last decade. This relative prominence has opened so many doors and helped me close a number of deals that would otherwise have been inaccessible. It even got me my first angel investment check of $25,000 via Twitter.
Know-it-all startup commentators love to sneer, “If your CEO tweets constantly, your company is in trouble.” The reality? If your CEO doesn’t tweet or lacks an authentic public presence, your company is in trouble. In this new world of personalities, founders must embrace visibility, like Jennie and many others have, build a real following, and cultivate an authentic voice. The future belongs to founders who put their face forward to carry their brands. After all, as the saying goes: We are all the media now.
A version of this post appeared in Africa Tech Round up in collaboration with Andile Masuku who pushed me to put pen to paper on this idea and shared with me his framework that buttressed the article.
Since writing this, another example appeared of the UAC foods CEO driving Gala sales from his personal posts on X.