Founders must learn to convert their experiences into a story, not just a pitch.
“You are brilliant. But so are the other candidates. We have 76 excellent applications for a single scholarship. If you want to make a difference, you must succeed in dazzling us.”
This is the opening line from the movie 21. A brilliant student applies for a scholarship to Harvard Medical School. The professor warns him: competence will not be enough.
At the end of the film, the same student, in the same office, no longer recites. He tells. His experience, his mistakes, his realizations. And the teacher understands all the skills, and therefore the invisible value, without us listing them.
This, in one scene, is what entrepreneurial success has become.
Value is no longer exchanged directly. It needs a vector to circulate. This vector is recognition. And like any rare resource that can be traded, it ended up creating its own economy.
I — A new, poorly understood responsibility
On LinkedIn, we no longer choose someone for their documented competence. We choose it for its ability to create connections.
This is not a drift. This is the logical consequence of a market where attention has become the scarce resource. And the story, the quickest way to capture it.
But we shouldn’t make any confusion: no, founders do not have to become influencers, to produce publications every day or even several times a day. On the other hand, yes, they have inherited a responsibility that they did not have before. That of speaking with the right tone and the right words to make their value convertible; and make recognition a real asset serving the growth of the company.
II — Why the founders do not exploit this capital
This capital is simple: it is everything that a founder has experienced, even well before becoming an entrepreneur, which could, if told, convince someone else. Most never go looking for it. Not for lack of material. Due to lack of time.
Because it takes time: analyzing your decisions, their consequences, what they reveal about your own motivations. This is called introspection. And a founder rarely gives time to it, I understand that, he gives his energy to his product, his technology, his customers. Which immediately brings results.
However, this contrarian decision taken at the right time, this intuition which would have shown that he has the shoulders to build a scale-up, no one ever talks about. It will therefore never contribute to building the confidence that an investor needs to make a decision. The pitch continues to prove its skills. While the interlocutor, opposite, is just looking for a reason to believe it.
Toinon Georget, co-founder of Waalaxy, understood this before the others. Rather than a well-polished corporate speech, he showed the raw daily life of his team on LinkedIn. Result: candidates who identified with it, journalists who saw a subject in it, a community which associated its name with a vision of the work. Recognition has not replaced value. She made it visible, therefore negotiable.
III — The limit: reproducing someone else’s recipe
Obviously, temptation lurks: “I do the same as Toinon, with my personal touch. If it worked for him, it will work for me. And I save a lot of time. »
Fake.
What worked for him wasn’t a formula, nor a hack applied at the right time. It was his spontaneity, his essence, amplified by the right media, at the right time, in the right way.
Copying the recipe without having gone through your own introspection, without having defined your own strategy, is to put on someone else’s mask. From a distance, it’s an illusion. But up close, we see that there is something wrong. And an investor, a candidate, a client always ends up feeling it.
Conclusion
The recognition economy does not reward those who speak the most or loudest. It rewards those who know how to convert their own value into something that others can recognize, without ever borrowing it from someone else.
There you have my definition of good personal branding.
Rather than asking yourself “how can I make myself visible?” “, the real question is rather: what is my invisible capital; and am I ready to look it in the face, before telling it?
