IDEAS FOR BUILDERS

How I repositioned Sojern from a boarding pass ad company into a $10 billion performance marketing platform, and what it taught me about data moats, identity pivots, and outpunching your weight. Most companies outgrow their original identity before the market notices. The product that got them started, the positioning that made sense at launch, stops being big enough for what the company has actually become. The hardest part isn’t seeing the bigger opportunity. It’s getting the market to let go of who they think you are so they can see who you’ve become. That’s the transition I led at Sojern, and it’s the one I see AI startups struggling with right now as their markets mature faster than their positioning.

What the first wave of machine learning can teach AI startups about winning in a crowded market. When a technology is new, the best product wins. When the technology commoditizes, the best story wins. The tricky part is knowing which phase you’re in, because most founders figure it out too late.

The most successful marketing campaigns don’t start with a strategy deck. They start with a collision between a real human need, the right messenger, and a team that knows how to turn attention into action. That’s what happened with JJ Watt’s Houston Flood Relief Fund, which raised $41.6 million from over 209,000 donors and became the largest crowdfunding campaign in history. I was the CMO at YouCaring when we launched it, and this is the story of the decisions that made it work.

A case study in brand positioning, category creation, and the decisions that compound. The most important marketing decision a startup will make isn’t about channels or budget. It’s about the story. I learned this at every company I’ve worked with, but nowhere more dramatically than at Relativity Space, where the right positioning took an unknown company to a $2.3 billion valuation.

The $252 billion creator economy underpays the people who create its value and exploits the fans who make it valuable. Both sides are starting to leave. The creator economy is worth an estimated $252 billion and growing at over 20% annually. More than 207 million people worldwide now identify as content creators. Influencer marketing alone hit $32.55 billion in 2025, a 35.6% jump from the year before. By every aggregate measure, this industry is booming.

Taste, the ability to discern what is good from what is merely competent, is becoming the scarcest and most valuable skill in business. AI can now generate 34 million images a day. Over half of new web content is AI-written. Europol estimates that 90% of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026. When production is infinite and nearly free, the bottleneck moves from “can we make this?” to “should we make this?” And that second question is a question of taste.

Loneliness is now a public health crisis on the scale of smoking and obesity, linked to 871,000 deaths annually and costing the US economy over $154 billion a year in lost productivity alone. But it is also a market signal. The companies that figure out how to create genuine belonging (not just connection, not just content, not just community features) will build the defining platforms of the next decade.

Narrative Capital is the accumulated value of a company’s story: its coherence, its emotional resonance, its ability to make people act. Like financial capital, it compounds over time. Unlike financial capital, most founders don’t know they’re building it, burning it, or failing to accumulate it at all. And in a market where AI can generate infinite content but consumer trust in that content is collapsing (from 60% enthusiasm to 26% in just two years), the ability to tell a story that people actually believe has become one of the scarcest competitive advantages in business.