Category: Your Business is Your Brand
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OpenAI: The Intelligence Utility
From Clarity to Gravity: OpenAI + Sam Altman A positioning analysis of the company that created a category, owns a product noun, and is searching for the concept underneath. A note before we begin. I wrote this analysis because I admire the work. OpenAI and Sam Altman have done something rare; they created a category…
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Palantir: The Company That Owns a Concept It Rarely Names
From Clarity to Gravity: Palantir Technologies A positioning analysis of Palantir Technologies and CEO Alex Karp A Note Before We Begin: I have been watching Palantir closely for a while now. The work Alex Karp and the team have built over twenty-two years is genuinely remarkable, and so is the way Karp talks about it.…
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The ingredient nobody’s checking
In 2021, a global professional services firm spent $14 million on a brand transformation. New visual identity. New messaging architecture. New brand guidelines distributed across 47 offices. They commissioned research before the launch. Prompted awareness was strong. Sentiment scores came back positive. The positioning statement (something about trusted expertise and human-centred outcomes) tested well in…
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Glossier: The Brand That Proved Everything and Said Nothing — Until It Started Talking
From Clarity to Gravity: Glossier Emily Weiss spent four years building trust before she sold a single product. She woke at 4 a.m. to write a beauty blog while working at Vogue, funded with $700 of her own money. She collected 11 rejections from VCs before Kirsten Green said yes. When the first four products…
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Positionmaxxing
The positioning industry has a positioning problem, and it’s costing you more than you think. A post on X recently stopped me cold. @Kpaxs wrote: “When you understand a system too well, you start optimizing for the system rather than for reality. You know what success looks like, so you pursue success-shaped things. You know what your…
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Anthropic: How the Company That Claims Safety Already Owns Trust — and Doesn’t Know It Yet
From Clarity to Gravity: Anthropic A Note Before We Begin: I wrote this because I’m genuinely fascinated by what Anthropic is building. I’ve been watching the company closely — the decisions, the product, the way Dario and Daniela Amodei show up publicly, the social content, the research papers, the moments where they chose principle over…
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The Figma Trap: Why Canva’s IPO Language Is Costing Billions Before They Even File
Two hours ago, a venture capitalist posted about Canva on LinkedIn. She previously ran a $100M early-stage fund. Spent seven years as a senior analyst at a $400M long/short equity fund, modelling public companies. Did late-stage, pre-IPO investing. She knows how to value software businesses. Her first instinct was to value Canva using Figma’s 10x…
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How Bumble Gets Back to $13 Billion
Today, we’ll dive into how a $13 billion company destroyed 97% of its value by abandoning the one thing that made it worth $13 billion. The highlight reel, first. Bumble had one job: be the dating app where women go first. That single rule — women message first, men wait — wasn’t a feature. It…
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EQ Bank: How Every Decision Proved Ownership While the Marketing Said Challenger
A note before you read this I have been watching what EQ Bank has built with genuine respect. Andrew Moor turned a personal irritation into a structural argument against extraction, and that is not a small thing. What the company has done, quietly and consistently, over more than a decade, is worth studying carefully. This…
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PC Financial: The Bank That Was Never a Bank
A note before you read this I’m a positioning strategist, not a financial analyst, and I have no inside access to PC Financial’s data, internal strategy, or Barry Columb’s thinking. What I have is what’s publicly visible: the decisions the company has made over time, the content it puts into the world, and the patterns…
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The Bifurcation Problem
Why consumer-loved companies lose their identity on the way to IPO. The moment a beloved product hires a “B2B CMO,” a clock starts ticking. Not toward growth but fracture. Not visibly or immediately. But the fracture is there, and it widens. There’s a pattern hiding in plain sight. The products people love most, the ones…
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The $108 Billion Word That Broke Strategy
Consulting firms needed differentiation. Academics needed publications. Corporations needed org charts. MBA programs needed career tracks. And “brand” needed to pay for all of it. This is the story of how one word got a hundred jobs, and why most of them shouldn’t exist. The Word That Launched a Thousand Frameworks The word “brand” entered…