Founder's philosophy
Brussels, October 2026
Dear founder,
Too many young companies start the same way: a name, a clean logo, and nothing underneath. Their brand describes what they do. It doesn't say what they stand for.
I believe a brand should be the opposite: one idea, at the centre, that the whole company runs on. Not only the logo and the colours. The people you hire, and the ones you don't. The decisions you make when nobody is watching. What your team argues about, and what it refuses to do. Built like that, a brand isn't something you show. It's something you run on.
Some studios have built their whole practice on this. Motto, who coined the “Idea Worth Rallying Around”, puts it well: “When a brand is treated as a leadership tool, it stops being a decoration and starts becoming direction.”
And some companies already run this way, from the inside. Hinge is a good example: its culture book, How We Do Things, opens with its CEO talking with his Chief Brand Officer before rebuilding the company, and its values (authenticity, empathy, courage) shape the last interview before every job offer. Values that decide who you hire are values that mean something. That's also why every strategy here comes with a Hiring Compass: your values, turned into the questions you ask the next person you hire.
AI is pulling brand in two directions at once. It has never been easier to make a brand part of everything a company does. And it has never been easier to skip the brand entirely: a name, a logo and a website in an afternoon, with no idea underneath, until everything starts to look the same. Paul Jun put it better than I can: “Most companies will use AI to make more noise. A few will learn how to make music.”
These are the reasons I built Subsurface: something that translates all of this for founders, at the very beginning. It's a conversation, not a form. It listens for the lines you say without noticing, and writes your strategy from your own words. But it stops where judgment starts. It will tell you what your company stands for; it will never tell you what it should look like. Which idea you live by, and how it looks, is for you, your strategist or your designer to decide. At the end of the day, someone has to decide, and that someone should be a person.
Paul Jun has argued for years that brand strategy is an operating system for how a company thinks and behaves. I agree, and I think the best companies are already run that way. I want more of them to start there: from the first conversation, not the first logo, with brand in the room where the company is decided. This tool is a small step in that direction. I know how small. But it's the step I can take, and I wanted to take it.
If you try it, I'd love to hear what it found in you. You can write to me directly at marv@marvnaka.com.
With respect for what you're building,