The people I interview for my “Three Questions With…” feature are usually multidimensional, multitalented, and ‘live in more than one world.’ That’s certainly the case with this week’s interviewee, Lauren Perkins, who describes herself as a “serial entrepreneur, full stack startup CMO {Chief Marketing Officer}, and Managing Director at Microsoft for Startups.”
Lauren and I connected via X/Twitter and LinkedIn earlier this year. I was intrigued to learn more about her background and experience, as well as her new book Think Like a Brand. Act Like a Startup. Among other things, she has been entrepreneur in residence at the Columbia Business School Eugene M. Lang Entrepreneurship Center and a founding instructor at General Assembly.
I’m grateful to Lauren for answering my questions about her work and career, her professional background, and the role of research, information, and knowledge in today’s organizations. After my questions, she has also provided some additional content about thinking like a brand while acting like a startup.
How would you characterize your day-to-day work, and how does this directly relate to the contents of Think Like a Brand. Act Like a Startup?
My work is a dynamic blend of stability and agility, mirroring the principles I’ve explored in Think Like a Brand; Act Like a Startup.
This book was inspired by my early career experiences working with major brands like Nike, Crunch Fitness and Bloomingdales – orchestrating large-scale launches and customer-centric experiences. These brands taught me the power of structured innovation and deep customer engagement — key elements that startups often struggle with.
In the early 2000s, several startup founders approached me for advice. Frankly, they were struggling to acquire customers, let alone retain them. Not only were there no frameworks or tools, there were so few “best practices” for startups, the challenges were even more fundamental given the early days of the New York City startup ecosystem. The BlackBerry founders capture this challenge well in the movie {BlackBerry, the 2023 Canadian biopic directed by and co-starring Matt Johnson}: “We were not heard, and they did not understand the product, so they did not buy the phone.” It shows how little an amazing product matters — if your customers don’t understand it they won’t buy it.
By applying the brand principles I learned from larger corporations to these smaller, agile environments, I was able to help these startups simplify their message, story and value proposition to get meetings with prospects, shorten their sales cycles and get wins on the board.
Over time, this evolved to more sophisticated ways of enhancing their user experience, clarifying their brand propositions, and aligning their values with their offerings, as captured in the book.
This “brand fairy dust” that I brought from my big brand experience not only addressed immediate operational struggles but also facilitated rapid growth and deal closures. My book distills these experiences, the stories of startup journeys, and offers a toolkit for marrying the structure of big brands with the nimble, innovative spirit of startups.
You have quite a varied work and life experience, including being a competitive swimmer and triathlete, as well as a startup founder and corporate executive. Would it be accurate to say that the combination of these experiences (not any one in particular) is what differentiates you, and your book?
Absolutely. My background — from the disciplined worlds of competitive swimming and multi-sport endurance of triathlons to the frenetic pace of startups and structured corporate environments — provides a unique vantage point. I’ve been lucky to have deep exposure to different perspectives and disciplines – it’s given me a particular lens for professional insights and the core messages of my book. This blend of experiences is where the blend stability and predictability of corporate structures with the agility and adaptability of startups originated.
One of my biggest learnings after more than a decade in the startup trenches affirms that all-agility, all the time leads to hustle, struggle and burnout for not just the founders but their people. It’s detrimental to the venture’s success. We need this combination of stability and agility as founders, leaders and innovators for our own sustainable performance and to model it for our people. Much like weight training, you need the tension against the muscle via reps to grow and build strength, but without proper rest and recovery, all the work will have been a waste. It just leads to injury and/or stagnation. Much like a startup.
My book aims to guide leaders and teams in fostering environments that balance these elements, thereby enhancing their innovation capacity without sacrificing the grounding stability essential for sustained growth.
I worked for many years as a corporate librarian at USA TODAY newspaper, so I was interested to read in the book that you worked for a local newspaper in high school, and that your “…research to uncover facts, trends, insights, user needs…” was a foundational experience. You also write about information flow and knowledge management within organizations. From your observations, what is the current state of effectiveness for how people search for and find accurate, reliable, information in today’s organizations?
As for my journalistic experience, I started at a local newspaper when I was in high school – guess you could say I was always curious and eager 😃
Little did I know that this early career opportunity was foundational in developing my ability to ask the right questions — a skill that has become increasingly important in today’s information-saturated business environment.
Effective information search and knowledge management are more critical than ever in organizations seeking to navigate the complexities of the modern business landscape.
In my early startup days, this informed my approach to customer discovery, and it’s been a valuable foundation as I’ve developed my design thinking skills. It’s an important element to knowledge management: how do we find and capture customer and market insights, and then apply them?
There are some easy tools to start with, whether that’s craft customer discovery workshops or interviews in Miro to follow the journey and capture their needs, to how you capture knowledge internally, which could be as simple as an insights channel on Slack.
One important truth that often gets overlooked in tech: organizations today must strive to maintain an unbiased perspective to ensure comprehensive and balanced understandings of situations. There’s so much information available, but the real challenge lies in finding what’s accurate and reliable. Many organizations still struggle with this, often due to outdated information systems or a lack of proper training in critical thinking and analytical skills.
My book discusses strategies to enhance information flow and knowledge management, especially in the third part of the book about operations. Ensuring that organizations can not only access but also effectively utilize the right information at the right time to make informed decisions.
EXTRA
The perspective of thinking like a brand while acting like a startup serves as a significant force multiplier for new ventures, whether they arise within the startup ecosystem or are fostered by corporate entities. This approach leverages existing resources — such as marketing capabilities, customer bases, market research & insights, data analytics, and expert SME {small and medium-sized enterprises} or industry-specific advisories that can be critical to understanding what is known, where the gaps and opportunities are and the insider insights to help create change or create new categories and businesses to solve the gaps within the industry/category and challenges of incumbents — to drive innovation and market penetration more effectively than traditional models.
By embracing both the structured approach of brand thinking and the innovative, flexible approach of startups, organizations can tap into substantial upside opportunities, enhancing their competitive edge and achieving scalable success. When a startup can leverage the access, knowledge and resources of a big brand through partnership, investment or other structures it can create unprecedented opportunities and momentum for growth while creating innovation for the bigger brand or corporate. These types of collaborations are immensely fruitful and necessary to design the future – one we’ll all be proud to be a part of.