Let the product be famous and keep the founder private
A company whose public face is its product can survive its founder having a bad year. A company built on a personality often cannot.
You can keep your privacy in the world by keeping your product, not your personality, the star.
Sarah Lacy knows the other side of this bargain. A business reporter and the author of Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good, a 2008 book about the founders of the second wave of web companies, she interviewed Mark Zuckerberg on stage at South by Southwest in March 2008. The audience turned on the interview, and for weeks afterwards the story online was about her rather than about Facebook. Someone who has been the subject of that kind of attention has good reason to recommend avoiding it.
The advice works on two levels. The plain one is privacy. Press and customers will take as much of a founder’s life as is offered. A founder who talks about the product, its users and its numbers gives them material that is useful and leaves the rest alone. Interviews stay on the company. Criticism, when it comes, lands on decisions that can be changed.
The second level is resilience. A brand built around one person inherits that person’s troubles. When Martha Stewart was prosecuted in 2004, the shares of the company that carried her name suffered along with her, because the company and the person were hard to tell apart. A product with its own identity can survive a founder leaving, getting sick or simply having a bad year in public.
Craigslist is a useful example of the approach. Its founder is well known, but the site itself is plain, anonymous and almost entirely about its listings. Few users could say what he looks like, and the service does not depend on anyone caring.
The line has limits. For a small company with no marketing budget, the founder is often the cheapest way to get attention. Journalists write about people more readily than products, and a founder willing to give talks, write a blog and answer email personally can reach customers no advertisement would. Some businesses sell trust in a particular person, such as a consultancy, a chef’s restaurant or a writer’s newsletter, and hiding that person would hide the product.
A workable middle is to be visible about the work and private about the rest. A founder can speak often and still keep family, health and personal opinions out of it. The product then carries the company’s name, and the founder’s public role is to explain it. That keeps most of the marketing value and gives up little of the privacy Lacy was describing.