This is a short monologue (YouTube video) by Jason M. Lemkin arguing that every employee embodies the company brand — "you are the brand" — and must be trusted to represent the company consistently. He describes personal brands built from promise-keeping (commit, deliver), the multiplier effect of repeated right actions, the need to admit mistakes (example: mispriced offering) and how building trust is essential—especially in security sales, where buyers require trust to engage.
Chapters
Every employee who works here is the brand. You're the brand first and foremost. How you, how you conduct yourselves, how you engage, how you market us, like what, what tone you set, like you are the brand every single day. And therefore I have to trust you to represent who we want to be and what we represent every single day. And that, that's just an expectation we have of every employee now until forever. But to your point, I think what we all had was personal brands. We, we knew we had great visionary and great product and great execution and great go to market. And so people who we had connected to earlier in our careers really trusted us based upon our word. They took us at our word that we were going to do something. And we were that thing was going to be exactly what we said we were going to do. Like there was no gray area. If we promised it, we committed it, we delivered upon it. And over time you see that change. Thankfully, in our case, it's due to some success. But there's a multiplier effect and order of magnitude where you do that enough times, you do the right thing every time. You get a reputation for doing the right thing every time. And sometimes that means stepping up and saying we got it wrong. I can think of a handful of instances very early on where maybe I miscalculated the pricing model. I just didn't understand the customer environment well enough and the number was wrong and I had to call him back and say, actually, it's not that. Right. That was my mistake. We'll honor our commitment to you. But building that brand and what I call the currency of trust, in every interaction, there's an opportunity to either build or break trust. You better be building it. And in security. Specifically, with the position our buyers are in, if you're not building trust, you don't have a chance.
