Should entrepreneurs build a personal or company brand, or both? With Prateek Joshi

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today, I'm delighted to have Prateek Joshi joining me all the way from Palo Alto in California. Prateek, thanks for joining me today.

Thanks, Jim, for having me. It's a wonderful podcast and I'm excited to be here.

Oh, thank you. Well, and you're a podcast host yourself, so I take that, you know, as a great compliment. And one of the things that you and I are gonna talk about is how you've managed to build 2 brands simultaneously. Your corporate brand for Pluto Shift and your personal brand, Prateek Joshi. So share with us a little bit about your story, but then help us to understand how have you managed to build 2 brands at once and why?

I have been a machine learning engineer throughout my career, right? So I went to school, studied machine learning, and right out of college, I joined NVIDIA and their machine learning team. So machine learning has pretty much been a part of me, and I consider myself a builder, meaning anything I do has to result in a product that can be used in the real world by somebody, right? So less research-oriented, more oriented towards building products. And that's pretty much all I've done in my career across a couple of companies and now PlutoShift. And along this journey, I realized that machine learning is very ubiquitous, is becoming more ubiquitous in the cyberspace or the virtual world, like search engines and e-commerce. But when it comes to the physical world, there's a pretty big gap. So that was the key motivation behind launching Pluralsight and building a machine learning product for the physical world. So along the process, I ended up writing 13 books on the topic, mostly technical books oriented towards developers want to build, right? Who want to build a variety of applications. And then through that, kind of, I got very comfortable with just building more and more. And yeah, so that's my personal journey of how I started and where I am today, running the company Plutoshift. We serve Fortune 500 customers. And with regards to the brand, I have always thought of myself as machine learning And it becomes, once you find that one thing, it becomes easier to associate yourself with it. Because if you're not busy doing, say, 7 things, it's easy to become recognized that, oh, Prateek is that machine learning guy, right? It becomes easy if you just do one thing and keep doing it. The compounding effect is amazing. You won't see it for the first few years. It just feels like, where is this going? It just seems flat. Where's growth? But There's a tipping point beyond which all of that compounds. And it's just magical when the compounding effect happens. Takes time though, but it does happen. And that's what I have followed, right? Just having seen the power of compounding and having seen the effectiveness of just choosing one thing and just going after it. And that's my personal brand. And for Pluto Shift, obviously, because I come from machine learning, The company that we're building is also centered on machine learning. So there was an extension of my professional expertise and also something that I'm very passionate about, which is climate. And Plurashift works at the confluence of the two. The company brand, obviously it exists for a purpose. We serve customers, right? It has its product. We are bound by agreements. So it has to work in a certain specific way. But yeah, I think the two brands that exist. They come from the same place, which is machine learning and climate, which is a passion of mine. So I hope that paints a picture here.

Yeah. So you throw in casually, you've written 13 books and I think anyone listening, including myself, would say, oh yeah, of course, 13. Is that all, Prateek? So I'm sure you've got, you're prolific actually by most people's standards, but Prateek, you throw that in about having 2 brands. Why would you not just have the Pluto Shift brand with yourself as, you know, founder CEO on that website and leave it there. Why have your own Prateek Joshi homepage or your own website? Just explain, because you've actually built 2 brands, haven't you? You've built one for the company and one for yourself. And I think that's really what I'm interested in finding out why you've done that. And then we'll talk about how you've done that.

Yeah, that's actually a very Very good question. And the reason is when you— so obviously, you know, before there was Plurashift, like there was Prateek Joshi, and that brand has been around for longer. And also even after we launched Plurashift, I think it's important to have a face on it and to humanize it, right? So Plurashift, the company is— it's a company, it's an entity, right? It has a logo, but there's no face to it. So I would say that when you have a firm and when you have a person, right, I think it's very important that the person has a brand, right? So it actually starts with the person because when I look at the products I use, or when we look at the people we do business with, for all of them, I know the person, right? The person running the account or running the company. And that was the first— that was one of the main reasons why we chose to engage. And again, look, if you get to the scale of Apple or Google, sure, the products are They speak for themselves. They have a very big market. You can go off, but for a very large majority of the companies and people around the world, that's not the case. Most companies are not Apple yet. So I think having a personal brand is important because it humanizes it. And also when you, the person, when you post something, when you write a book, when you write a blog post, when you talk, when you appear on podcasts, I think it puts a human face to it. It's a human element to it. And also people don't want to see a very polished, like a polished marketing message posted from the company versus the person talking about authentic experiences. I think it makes a difference. So in my case, I think I believe that the person, and in this case, me, I think having a brand that stands for something, it matters a lot. And the good thing is it's very, you don't need to duplicate the efforts. So, for example, Prateek Joshi and Pluralshift, right? 2 different entities in this case, but a lot of the content and messaging and what you stand for, they actually overlap quite a bit. But it is important that when you work with a customer, they see Pluralshift, the company, that, okay, it's there, it stands for something, there is content, and we can engage with the product. But there's also Prateek Joshi, who is the person who knows about machine learning, and we can trust the person to provide a good service, build good products, and in general, make them successful with what they want to do. So that's the, that's my thinking behind the person building a brand and Pluralsight, the company building the brand.

Okay. So many people might rely on having LinkedIn page, you know, supercharged LinkedIn profile. Why do you think it's necessary to have your own personal website as well as, for example, a fully featured LinkedIn plus maybe a Linktree account with all your other socials?

Right. I believe that different people consume content differently. And if you want to expand your network, if you want to reach more people and include them in your network, I think it's important to have these different, different areas of visibility. So for example, LinkedIn is one way. Many people log into LinkedIn. They see your post. That's great. Some people might not be so active on LinkedIn, but when they learn about you, they want to know, okay, who is he and what does he do? Right? So pratikj.com is a home for that. You go there, you quickly, in like 10 seconds, you'll know who I am, how to get in touch with me, what I've done. And what do I do well? And also when you think about the content I create, right? So, you know, I write short-form content, long-form content, you know, I talk, so audio content, I post on LinkedIn. And what this does is, as you know, different people consume content in different ways. I think it's important that once you have an idea, like let's say there are many nuggets that keep Coming. Once you have an idea, you don't have to redo the work or duplicate a lot of the efforts, right? So once you have content with minimal extra work, you can use it for your website, your LinkedIn, or once you have an idea for a blog post, you can write the blog post. You can post the same on LinkedIn. You can convert that to short-form content. You can talk about it. So I think getting mileage out of what you have across different formats. I think it just, it just helps people connect with you on platforms of their choice or the mode of communication of their choice.

Right. I think that's a really great thought in there as well, Prateek. And presumably when you've got the personal website, you're able to introduce some personal themes that may or may not be relevant as far as your customer is concerned, because they're not buying your motivation. They're buying your products, aren't they? Do you want to explain a little bit about how you're using the 2 platforms? Maybe one can lead the conversation and show where you're going with the business emotionally and your goals and how the company then is sharing what solutions it's providing for its customers.

So the way I see it, when it comes to Plutoshift, the company, we serve businesses, right? So it's enterprise software, it's B2B. And a lot of our effort, at least in the earlier parts of the funnel, is we want to reach out to people. We want people to know about us so that they would like to kind of, they want to have an introductory conversation with us. They want to see the product. They want to see how it works. They want to see case studies, successful case studies. They want references. So how can we initiate a lot of those conversations, right? So that's the first step, meaning if you, the end goal obviously is to have Great customers who have great revenue that grows fast. But it all starts with how do we get people interested in having an introductory conversation? And I think that's where the personal brand has been helpful, at least in my case, is a lot of times initially, I just try to be helpful. If you're a big company and you are sitting on lots of data, you want to know, okay, I want to do something, but what can I do with it? Like, I don't— my goal is to reduce my electricity bills, right? That's my end goal, but I don't know how to connect this. raw temperature data to that end goal. So because of my personal brand or personal knowledge in machine learning or data, I just try to be helpful. Like during the first intro call, let's talk about, okay, what do you have? What are your goals? And how can I help? Right. And help is sometimes as simple as helping them visualize or architect a solution on a piece of paper. Just knowing that, okay, data goes from here to there. You process it, you store it, and then the next step is this module. And then, you know, the next step is this. So just kind of helping them understand and talking about the available options, pros and cons of each option. That actually helps a lot. Because I do this for a living, I know a lot more about, say, building a machine learning system than somebody whose primary expertise is chemical dosing or primary expertise is running reverse osmosis membranes.

Yeah.

So that's how I think having a personal brand helps attract kind of these conversations. And then if there's a good fit, then we explore further. Oh, Prateek, okay. You know, you helped me with this knowledge. Do you also have a product that addresses this? Then yeah, then we introduce PlutoShift and tell them about, okay, if you need a product like this, we have it here and we are working with large companies, Fortune 500. So we're happy to provide references. So that's how. I try to sequence these events so that, you know, one, I try to be helpful. Like I want to be, you know, I should, usually I'm like, I'm the hub that if somebody has a machine learning question, I hope that they come to me, right? Just for consultation or obviously all of this free, there's no charge, but basically I try to be helpful to people who are seeking information about machine learning.

In a nice way, your personal brand is almost like the open part of the funnel, isn't it? And it's not engaging the company's resources as a presales. Right. Which otherwise your company would be almost in a pre-sales mode. Right. So that's a very clever separation of, yeah, a sort of thought leadership. And when it comes to things like speaking events, for example, I noticed you've got a podcast as well. Are you doing those as Prateek Joshi and especially with your interest in climate change, or are you doing those as PlutoSoft? How are you tackling that? dichotomy, really.

Yeah, I am doing all of that as Prateek Joshi. And unless obviously it's discussed beforehand, I don't talk about Pluto Shift during a podcast. Like, it's mostly focused on, as you said, about a specific topic, like using machine learning for climate or building a machine learning career, or how do you build a machine learning startup or fundraising or Any number of topics where I've spent time on it, I can speak to it. So that's the intent behind the podcast is to share knowledge and not necessarily market Pluralsight. But at the same time, there are many podcasts where they do want to talk about what is Pluralsight doing and how are you solving the climate problems for your customers? In that case, yes, I do talk about it. But to answer your question, It's all of these. I'm doing that as Prateek Joshi, the person, not PlutoShift, the company.

Can I ask a question about how your employees, and I'm not sure whether you've got fellow shareholders or not, but how other people in the organization feel about there being this dichotomy between Prateek, the brand, and PlutoShift, the brand? Because some people might feel a bit that, you know, well, really you belong to us and the company owns everything that Prateek Joshi does. Do you wanna just talk to that? Because that can be an anxiety amongst shareholders in the CEO becoming the brand.

Right. Actually, I've been very open about this with our investors, our teammates, and potential future investors. And actually, that's part of the reason why our investors chose to work with me in this case is because if you If only PlutoShift exists and the CEO or the founder has no standing in the community, the question is, how will you attract new investors? How will you attract new teammates? Right? How will you attract new customers? Because before they get attracted to the entity, they always look at the person first. It's almost like a visceral reaction. You want to look up who's doing it. Like when I first heard about this podcast, the first thing I did, I looked you up, right? I learned about you and it got me excited.

Right.

So it's almost as humans, we are, it's almost like a visceral reaction. If I hear about something I want to know who's doing it. That's like the first thing I do. And most of the people usually do that too. So I think I would say it's to the company's advantage and it has worked well, right? In the last 5 years of track record, it has worked really well that Prateek Joshi as a brand can be used to accelerate, at least for the company, the top of the funnel, right? And also just kind of be, if we are, if you're helpful in the community, a lot of that comes back too, because I was helpful to somebody like 3 years ago. Right now they said, you know, they're saying, hey, I know this amazing machine learning person looking for a new job. Do you want to talk to them? And so attracting kind of, it becomes a very good part of building your team and your network. And you are helpful to somebody, you know, in the future, somebody else helps you. And if you are, the way I see it is I try to be a useful member of the machine learning community. And if you keep doing that over time. I think the benefits are enormous, both in terms of building a company, attracting talent, and also attracting future investors.

Prateek, that's a wonderful explanation of the value of having, you know, dual brands for the founder, CEO, and for the company and the products and services. If people want to find out more about you and about PlutoShift, do you want to tell people where there are 2 places they can go to find out? Do you want to share those?

Of course. You can visit prateekj.com to learn more about me and you can get in touch with me. And if you want to learn about Plurashift, you can visit plurashift.com and you can get in touch with us to know more about what we're building.

Prateek Joshi joining me from Palo Alto in California. Thanks so much for sharing with me your journey as an entrepreneur. I know you have acres of things you could talk about with machine learning and anyone that's interested, I'm sure will come and find you. And thanks for sharing your commitment and your vision to helping others and showing the value of this. So thank you so much for coming on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show today.

Jim, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation and I think it's a very unique discussion we had today. I'm glad that we got a chance to talk about it.

Me too. Thank you very much for listening to my slight take on how entrepreneurs can help fellow entrepreneurs to get noticed. I think that's an area that people aren't addressing and that's really how I'm trying to serve really the community that I'm helping. So thank you so much for taking time. Thank you so much. You've been listening to Pratik Joshi in Palo Alto and me, Jim James, here in the UK on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show. Thank you so much for listening. Just remember, keep on communicating.