Scroll your LinkedIn feed and count how many of the company posts you'd recognize without seeing the logo. Honest answer is two, three, maybe. The rest blend into one polished voice that says nothing in particular.
This isn't a writing problem. It's a memory problem. Brands need a shape to attach memory to. A face. A recurring joke. A specific opinion the person keeps coming back to. Without that there's nothing for the reader to hang the post on, and the post evaporates the moment they scroll past.
Companies that hide their founders are making the most expensive marketing decision they don't know they're making. They've optimized for a kind of safety (no embarrassing personal opinions, no risk of the spokesperson saying the wrong thing) that buys them complete invisibility. The post lands in the feed, the algorithm shows it to fifty people, none of them remember it the next morning, and the post director writes another one that will also be forgotten by lunch.
The founders who become public faces aren't braver. They're more accurate about what actually makes a brand stick. They've figured out that the cringe of posting under their own name with their own opinions and their own jokes is the price of being remembered at all. The smooth corporate voice has no distance from a thousand other smooth corporate voices. The person who tweets nonsense about football on Monday and a sharp product take on Tuesday gets remembered because the football tweet proved they were a real human, and the product take inherited that credibility.
You can't borrow this from your CMO. The CMO has the wrong incentive. A CMO who writes too personally exposes the company to risk that the founder doesn't carry the same way. So most companies smooth their voice into something safe, and safe is invisible.
If you're a founder and you're avoiding personal posting because it feels cringe, you're not protecting the brand. You're starving it. The brand without you in it is a logo, a tagline, and a list of features that look exactly like the competitor's. The brand with you in it is "the company that compliance guy with the bad jokes runs."
People remember people. They don't remember positioning statements.
This works the other way too. If you sell the company in five years and disappear from the feed, the brand goes with you. That's not a bug. Founder-led is a season, not a permanent strategy. But it's the only season where a small company can punch above its weight without paying for it in ads.
Post the dumb thing. Post the personal thing. Post the football tweet. The brand is the person or there's no brand.
— Simon