Recently, Nikhil Kamath of Zerodha publicly offered to intern — without pay — at Aravind Srinivas’s company Perplexity, to learn about the AI industry. Kamath had interviewed Srinivas on his YouTube channel, which has about 1.5 million subscribers.
Several Indian startup founders maintain active social media profiles. Bhavish Aggarwal of Ola, Aman Gupta of Boat, Ashneer Grover (formerly of BharatPe), Vineeta Singh of Sugar Cosmetics, and Namita Thapar of Emcure Pharmaceuticals have substantial social media following. Platforms like business reality TV series Shark Tank India have made many founders household names — their personalities often overshadowing their companies or products in public discourse.
Among other effects, building a personal brand helps founders cultivate a loyal following across ventures, product stages, and platforms — creating a ready base for future launches and initiatives.
Interplay of factors
The personality-brand interplay, however, begs a relook. Tesla’s shares have plummeted in recent months owing to Elon Musk’s politically loaded, provocative, and in-your-face mannerisms on X. In April 2024, the Bombay Shaving Company (and Shantanu Deshpande, its owner) suffered backlash due to the poor landing of an advertisement, prompting calls for “better brand advisors”.
The relationship between a founder’s public persona and his or her company’s brand is a complex dynamic with three distinct outcomes — mutual benefit, mutual harm, or negligible effect. They depend on how the founder’s personal communications, values, and actions align with, contradict, or remain independent of his or her business’s core brand promise.
Conflicting factors
When founders’ views and/or behaviours contradict their businesses’ core values, market positioning, or customer expectations, the dissonance can significantly damage brand equity. For instance, while Tesla’s positioning is that of an environmentally conscious, forward-thinking automotive and energy company, Musk’s social media activity has periodically created a dissonance with this brand identity.
His unpredictable posts on X, including politically divisive statements and personal feuds, have at times alienated Tesla’s core environmentally conscious customer base. Even before Donald Trump’s second term, a 2023 survey showed that 32 per cent of potential electric vehicle buyers cited Musk’s public persona for not considering Tesla.
In late 2022, Tesla’s stock dropped about 65 per cent from its peak, with analysts largely blaming “Musk risk” for it — namely the volatility generated by his conduct at a time when he wasn’t publicly supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign for US presidency. The ensuing polarising stance further intensified scrutiny.
More recently, in March, Tesla’s stock fell by over 5 per cent amid broader tech sell-offs and renewed concerns over Musk’s leadership.
Brand reinforcement
When founders authentically embody the values, mission, and ethos of their businesses, their personal brands can amplify their company’s market position. The founder’s visibility and the company’s brand equity mutually reinforce each other, creating a compounding effect that drives customer loyalty and sharpens market differentiation.
An example of this is the Swedish entrepreneur Matilda Djerf and her company Djerf Avenue. Starting off as a social media influencer known for her distinctive style and values of authenticity and sustainability, Djerf leveraged her personal following to launch the fashion brand in 2019. Her personal brand — characterised by transparency, body positivity, and sustainable fashion choices — reinforces her company’s core values. In less than five years, she turned it into a $35-million brand with a marketing budget below 5 per cent of revenue.
By maintaining consistent messaging across personal and corporate channels, Djerf has shown how personal brand can powerfully amplify business success when values align.
But the brand suffered when, in December 2024, an investigation by Swedish news outlet Aftonbladet led to allegations by 11 current and former employees of a “toxic work culture” at Djerf Avenue, including instances of belittlement and body-shaming. The public backlash saw customers expressing disappointment and some vowing to withdraw their support. Djerf responded by expressing deep regret and committing to improving the workplace environment.
Brand independence
Sometimes a founder’s public persona neither significantly enhances nor detracts from the company’s brand equity, as typically happens in industries where product functionality substantially outweighs brand considerations or when founders deliberately maintain a low profile despite business success. This neutral equilibrium can provide stability in certain market contexts.
This dynamic is more common in business-to-business (B2B) firms, where the founder’s persona often has limited public-facing impact. For instance, Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, suggested that young Indians should work 70 hours a week to boost the nation’s productivity. While this remark sparked widespread debate and criticism, Infosys’s brand remained largely unaffected. This resilience can be attributed to Infosys’s focus on delivering consistent services to its corporate clients, where the emphasis is on functionality and reliability rather than the personal opinions of its leadership.
Similarly, in other countries, founders of B2B companies have made controversial statements without significantly impacting their company’s brand. For example, in the US, Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle Corporation, has been known for his outspoken and sometimes contentious remarks. Despite this, Oracle’s reputation as a leading provider of database software and technology has remained intact.
Strategic implications
Understanding the personality-brand game offers valuable guidance for entrepreneurs navigating public visibility. Research indicates that UK unicorns with founders who have the largest number of LinkedIn followers raised over 20 per cent more funding — nearly £763 million — on average, compared to other unicorns in the country. Additionally, a Forbes article notes that 77 per cent of consumers are more likely to buy from a company when its CEO uses social media, and 82 per cent trust companies more when their senior executives are active online.
However, this advantage comes with significant responsibility. For Indian entrepreneurs building their social media presence, several principles emerge:
First, strategic alignment between personal and corporate messaging is crucial — inconsistencies are quickly spotted and penalised in today’s transparent media environment.
Second, authenticity remains paramount, as audiences are increasingly sophisticated at detecting manufactured personas.
Finally, recognising when to separate personal opinions from corporate messaging strategically can prevent unnecessary brand damage.
Playing the game
As more Indian founders leverage social media, mastering the personality-brand dynamic becomes essential. The challenge isn’t in choosing between visibility and anonymity, but in strategically managing how personal brand amplifies — rather than undermines — business objectives.
Successful founders recognise that while personality and brand are distinct, they exist in continuous dialogue. Regular brand alignment audits, establishing clear boundaries on public commentary, developing crisis management protocols, practising strategic authenticity in communications, and distributing visibility by elevating multiple team members as brand ambassadors are some ways to manage this.
As the Indian startup ecosystem matures and global competition intensifies, founders who master this balance between personal visibility and brand alignment will separate market leaders from competitors. The most valuable founder brands aren’t the loudest but the ones that convert personal influence into enduring business advantage.
(Manoshij Banerjee is an independent consultant on digital culture and behaviour, and Mohammed Shahid Abdulla is a faculty member at IIM-Kozhikode)