Letter from the Editor
Our Co-Founder & CEO on the challenges Founders & CEOs face daily & how The Lead created a forum for these leaders to participate in open discussion.
Noah Gellman, The Lead
“Its lonely at the top” so says nearly every CEO. There is a tremendous amount of area to cover especially for the CEOs and Founders leading digital native brands. In the beginning, it all seemed so simple — make a great product, develop a sticky brand, acquire through Facebook, never open a store, discount to undercut pricing, and earn a tech valuation. It seemed like a straight forward blueprint. In fact, last year we wrote The Anatomy of a Digital Native Brand to try to determine if there is indeed a clear formula. Well, there is not.
The buck stops with the CEO and with a zig-zag path ahead, this means managing every aspect of the business, while continuing to raise money, operating as a brand, but looking for the most efficient way to escape the gravitational pull every brand is subject to. So the question becomes, where do you turn?
You turn to the other CEOs and Founders facing the same challenges. The key is to engage, to ask, to meet and to learn. Business is not built on a marketing automation platform, a facebook buy, or a supply chain. It is built on people. It is built on knowledge. It is built on relationships.
We put together The Lead Assembly to bring this community together, to bring the leaders facing the same challenges to a venue where they could openly share. We hosted 65 CEOs and Founders, we built 27 unique topics, facilitated 70 1-to-1 meetings, all under the roof of The Four Seasons Hotel in Tribeca.
As we look to 2020, our team is excited about not just to bring back The Lead Assembly for these CEOs & Founders of digital native brands, but to bring the same experience to other leaders across iconic brands and retailers as well as the digital native community.
It’s lonely at the top, but it can be lonely all over. Sitting in a room of peers, in conversations designed around the most pressing challenges, learning from the people who experience your world — that is The Lead Assembly. We look forward to you joining us in 2020.
Noah Gellman
Editor-in-Chief | Co-Founder & CEO
The Lead