By: Matthew Kayser
Kim Than, Entrepreneur, Founder and CEO of Genius PR, and Co-host of Onchain Capital Podcast
Building a personal brand has become a key part of growing a business. When the founder is well known and trusted, that trust spills over to the company, faster and cheaper than any advertising campaign could achieve. That’s why so many founders are stepping into the spotlight, and why a strong personal brand has moved to be the foundation a company’s reputation is built on.
Mark Zuckerberg is the clearest case study in how deliberate this has become. He spent a decade being read as a product, an engineer who happened to run a company. Now he’s read as a physical presence, with visible reinvention and an appetite for risk. The market extends trust to people it can recognize. Founders who get that manage how they’re seen as carefully as they manage the product itself.
The economics behind this are straightforward once you see them. Trust in a person is transferable to the company that person runs, and transferred trust is cheaper than purchased attention. Elon Musk doesn’t need to buy ads for Tesla. He doesn’t need to because people already trust, or at least track, Elon Musk, and that attention routes straight to the company.
But almost nobody in this conversation asks the question that actually matters once the brand starts working. What happens to that value when you try to sell the company?
Here’s what changes. A personal brand is great for generating leads, but it also compresses the market’s uncertainty about the company itself. Investors and acquirers are pricing risk constantly, and a founder with real public credibility, real third-party validation, a real track record people can point to, reads as lower risk. A company led by a founder nobody’s heard of has more work to do than a company led by a founder the market already trusts.
There are two brands in play: yours and your company’s. Your personal brand is what people think of when they hear your name. Your company’s brand lives in its products, team, systems and reputation. The best founders build both at the same time, making themselves visible while making sure the company can thrive without them. Customers end up trusting the founder and the company, and one doesn’t replace the other. The goal is a business that stands on its own, with or without you, because that’s where the value sits at exit.
Most founders focus on one, assume it’s the whole asset, and leave value on the table when a buyer discounts the parts that were never made independent of the founder.
That discount has a name: the key-person discount. Valuation experts typically knock 10% to 25% off a company’s value when it depends too heavily on one person. Buyers have also gotten better at protecting themselves against uncertainty, and a founder-dependent business is a big source of it. In 2025, about one in four private acquisitions tied part of the price to future performance, and almost nine in ten held back some of the money after closing.
The obvious pushback here is if buyers discount founder dependence, why build a personal brand at all? Because credibility and dependence are different things. A buyer pays more for a founder the market trusts, since that trust lowers the risk on everything the company says about itself. The same buyer pays less when customers, deals and press only show up because that founder personally brought them in. The brand is an asset when it vouches for the company. It becomes a liability when it replaces the company.
I’ve seen this scenario play out countless times from a public relations perspective. Entrepreneurs approach us seeking to boost their visibility, gain media attention, and quickly establish a personal brand, and that’s the easy part. The tougher discussion is about the purpose behind this desired visibility.
If you’re building a personal brand right now, ask yourself one question honestly. Is your business elite because of you, or is it elite on its own, with you making it move faster?
About Kim Than
Kim Than is an entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Genius PR, a global media agency helping tech, AI and Web3 companies build credibility through earned media, and co-host of the Onchain Capital podcast. Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list in 2023, he is one of the industry’s leading voices on personal branding and modern public relations. Learn more at KimThan.com and connect on LinkedIn.
