The Branding Cartel: Startups Need Mechanics, Not Magicians
Field Notes from a Builder
In the past two months, I have invited three different brand agency principals to join us in the trenches.
The pitch I made to each of them was simple. I will fly you out. I will put you up. Spend one full day in a room with my cofounders. Let’s roll up our sleeves, get whiteboard markers on our hands, and co-create our brand strategy together. Let’s figure out who we are while the engine is actually running.
Their words were different, but the responses were identical and immediate: polite and absolute refusal.
That, they explained, is not how the process works. Their process requires a brief. Their process requires distance. If we wanted to collaborate, we could fly to their cities at various intervals (and meet at a coffee shop on their schedule).
I was offering a high-stakes, collaborative war room. They countered with a polite boundary and a rigid “this is how creatives work”.
Over the last few months, as I’ve been evaluating Go-To-Market (GTM) and branding partners for my portfolio of startups, I have hit this exact same invisible wall. It is an industry-wide cartel. They all share the same rigid approach, fiercely protecting a playbook built for a corporate world that no longer exists, and aggressively selling it to startups that can’t afford to live in it.
If you are a founder, you already know the pitch.
It always starts with the legacy slide. The agency principals sit across from you and proudly list their conquests. They worked on Nike. They touched a Coca-Cola campaign. They executed a rebrand for a fifty-year-old Fortune 500 bank.
They expect you to be dazzled. But building a seasonal ad campaign for a legacy brand with a billion-dollar war chest has absolutely zero correlation to finding product-market fit for a six-month-old startup.
Nike has a legacy; a startup has a hypothesis. Nike is fighting for market share; a startup is fighting for oxygen.
When you invite these agencies to actually step into that fight – to sit with us and co-create – they recoil. They don’t want to collaborate; they want a one-way street. They demand a written brief or a one-way interview. Once they have it, they will disappear into a “Black Box.”
The unspoken subtext is arrogant and clear: Strategy is for the experts; execution is for the founders. But any builder knows that strategy without execution is just hallucination.
This “magic,” they assure you, will take place over several weeks. A team of creatives will retreat into a virtual cave. To even unlock the door to this cave, the price tag starts at $5,000, quickly escalating toward $50,000 for a full “launch.” The output of that check? A heavy, 50-page static PDF.
It is a fundamentally broken model. And here is the hard truth about what founders are actually buying:
The cartel sells “Moments.” Startups need “Motion.”
The traditional agency playbook is strictly episodic. They vanish for sixty days, return for a grand presentation, and slide the legendary “Brand Book” across the table.
But startups don’t really have launches. Startups are in a continuous, daily battle for context. You put something into the market on Tuesday, the market punches you in the mouth on Wednesday, and you have to rewrite your messaging by Thursday morning.
A 50-page static PDF is useless on Thursday morning.
The difference between an agency and an actual startup partner is stark.
The Cartel, nee Agency, thrives on isolation and theater. They want to sell you a “Big Reveal” – a static, impenetrable Brand Book delivered after sixty days of radio silence. They build isolated campaigns that look beautiful on their own portfolio websites, all while absorbing absolutely zero operational risk if your product fails to connect with the market.
Startups don’t survive on reveals; they survive on iteration. They need mechanics willing to climb into the trenches, delivering real-time context instead of polished presentations. A startup’s brand isn’t a PDF; it’s a living mutation that requires continuous, daily feedback loops and partners who are willing to share the risk – and the mutual upside – of figuring it out together. In other words, creativity with real revenue and customer impact.
This rigid adherence to the Madison Avenue playbook isn’t just frustrating – it is a massive market failure. It is leaving high-velocity global ecosystems completely neglected.
Over the past year of writing these Field Notes, I have spent time walking the ground in ecosystems that are catching fire, far outside the traditional tech bubbles.
When I was in India on a builder’s pilgrimage, I watched founders navigating a “river of paper” and pitching in rooms that rewarded theater over substance. But when the rooms emptied, I saw the real work. I learned that real founders don’t build for abstract “Customer Personas” – the kind agencies love to put on slide 14 of their PDF.
Real builders build for the Meera sitting at the reconciliation desk. They ship a clunky prototype that saves an operations lead three hours in a single week. They understand that you must ship the solution before the code. A 50-page Brand Book doesn’t know Meera. To those Indian founders outrunning big brands with raw, working code, a traditional agency isn’t a guardrail; it’s just more gravel and friction in their road to success.
And in Abu Dhabi, surrounded by the raw momentum of the AI boom at Machines Can Think, I met technical founders like Luca. Luca was 29, building unsexy, highly vital logistics models to reduce spoilage in hot climates. He didn’t need a glamorous marketing reveal.
I sat with Luca as an older, quiet investor interrogated his model. The investor didn’t ask about the “fast path to exit” or the “brand narrative.” He asked the hard things: Where does your data come from? What happens when a customer uses it in conditions you didn’t expect? Then the investor said something that every GTM professional should print out and tape to their monitor: “This doesn’t become valuable because your model is clever. It becomes valuable because someone trusts it enough to use it when the pressure is on.”
A traditional agency doesn’t build trust when the pressure is on. They build a launch deck and walk away. They leave founders like Luca alone to face the angry operations team when the system breaks.
There is a global spread of startup ecosystems currently moving at breakneck speed. These founders are building in public, iterating in real-time, and solving massive, messy problems.
And they are completely underserved by the traditional creative class.
Why? Because traditional agencies are too slow, too inflexible, and too risk-averse to keep up. You cannot serve a founder in Bangalore or Abu Dhabi who is pushing code twice a day if your internal process requires a three-week discovery phase just to pick a color palette.
We need a wake-up call on both sides of the table.
For the founders: Stop buying the wrong deliverables. Are you paying a traditional agency $50,000 to “launch” your startup? Are you buying a static PDF, or are you investing in a continuous feedback loop? Guard your runway. Demand motion.
And for the GTM professionals, the strategists, and the branding experts who are tired of the theater: The corporate playbook is dying. The cartel is losing its grip. The next generation of massive companies won’t be built by founders willing to sit quietly while you hide behind your creative process and disappear into your virtual cave.
We don’t need magicians pulling reveals out of a hat. We need mechanics.
If you are a partner who knows how to build in motion, who wants to co-create, and who isn’t afraid to get your hands dirty in the trench, there is an entire world of founders waiting for you.
I have a portfolio of fantastic businesses ready to do exactly that. So do many others I know - in India, in Abu Dhabi, in Chicago.
Enjoy your loved ones and the rest of your day!
And thank you for spending some of it with me.
Warm regards,
Adi