How to Use Cognitive Behavioral Branding to Create New Categories with Ari Yablok, Head of Brand at Island

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Exit Five CMO Podcast

Episode: How to Use Cognitive Behavioral Branding to Create New Categories with Ari Yablok, Head of Brand at Island
Date: September 22, 2025
Host: Dave Gerhardt
Guest: Ari Yablok, Head of Brand at Island

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Dave Gerhardt dives deep with Ari Yablok, Head of Brand at Island, exploring how cognitive behavioral principles can fuel new category creation in B2B enterprise software. The discussion spans the art and science of branding, lessons from Ari’s agency background, the process of building Island’s category-defining narrative, and tactical advice for marketers tasked with crafting brands from scratch. This is a masterclass in brand strategy, category creation, and the real “soul” of branding.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Introduction to Island and Ari’s Background

• Ari's Journey to Island:
  • Previously with Atreo, a branding agency in Tel Aviv, specializing in naming, messaging, and positioning for tech companies.
  • Recounts being asked to name a new, revolutionary company by Island’s founders (Mike Fey and Dan Amiga).
  • Describes selecting the name "Island" to evoke freedom and an unencumbered workspace, in stark contrast to the locked-down, frustrating experience of traditional enterprise security software.
• Island’s Profile:
  • Series D startup, $375M funding, $3B valuation; investors include Sequoia, Insight, Cotu, Cisco, Georgian.
  • Creator of the “enterprise browser” — a category-defining product designed to change how companies secure and manage digital work.

“If you could build a brand from scratch that was going to be instantly important, this would be it.” — Ari (01:49)

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2. Category Creation vs. Strategic Positioning

• True Category Creation:
  • Not about rewording or differentiating existing products, but about building something fundamentally new.
  • Ari draws a sharp distinction:

    “You're either a category because what you built is a new thing, or you're trying to be a category because you need a way to separate yourself from the competition... that's just more strategic positioning and not category creation.” — Ari (07:56)

• SEO & Language Tensions:
  • Building a category often means inventing language and fighting against the grain of existing SEO/search demand.
  • Example: Drift and “conversational marketing”—balancing ownership of a new term with the SEO benefit of existing keywords.
• Strategic Positioning:
  • Dave and Ari discuss being “number one” in a well-defined space ("ruler" positioning) vs. creating a need for something entirely new.
  • The necessity of convincing prospects not just that your solution is best, but that the category itself is necessary.

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3. Brand-Building Philosophy: Art Meets Science

• Frameworks vs. Intuition:
  • Ari shares how frameworks (like archetypes and input interviews) help, but ultimate creative intuition is essential.
  • There is no formula for a brand story that’s truly unprecedented.
  • Key litmus test:

    “Can other people say this? Can the brand next to me come up with the very same argument? I can't do it.” — Ari (16:12)

• Founder DNA and Differentiators:
  • The strongest differentiators come from the founders’ vision and the company’s DNA, not from marketing spin.
  • Example: Island’s existence is rooted in the unique shift to web-based work.

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4. The Story as the Foundation

• Narrative Comes First:
  • Ari starts with a written narrative — which becomes the blueprint for everything (homepage, sales deck, product copy).
  • The first job: define and communicate “why this company exists,” not just what the product does.
  • Importance of deciding what not to say as much as what to say.
  • Echoes Dave’s experience at Drift: narrative precedes all deliverables.

“The story is the strategy. How do you not start with the words you choose to tell the story?” — Ari (27:00)

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5. Deliverables and the Head of Brand Role

• Early Deliverables:
  • Crafting and socializing the core narrative with the executive team.
  • Building the website and launch video to express the new category.
  • Developing the sales deck rooted in the central story.
• Head of Brand vs. Head of Marketing:
  • At Island, brand took priority over short-term lead gen because the enterprise sales motion relied on trust, education, and big vision.
  • Not every startup needs a Head of Brand from day one; unique to Island’s ambitions and the demands of category creation.
• Evaluating Brand Success:
  • Internal alignment around the story and identity (“do we feel proud of this?”).
  • Over time, external validation: growing adoption of new language, inbound mentions, and search for category terms.

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6. Cognitive Behavioral Branding: The Psychology of Brand

• Applying CBT to Branding (32:40):
  • Ari introduces his “Cognitive Behavioral Branding” framework, modeled on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy:
    • Triangle: Actions ↔ Feelings ↔ Beliefs
    • Marketers can’t force actions (buy, click, adopt) without first changing feelings; can’t authentically change feelings without changing underlying beliefs.
    • The goal of category creation and brand is to reshape beliefs about what’s necessary or possible.
  • Key brand test: Are we fundamentally changing what people believe, or just what they do at surface level?

“If I'm able to change my belief... then I will feel differently and then I'll behave differently... Imagine how you could apply that framework to branding.” — Ari (31:05)

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7. Defining Brand: Visual Identity, Soul, & Reputation

• Brand Design and Strategy:
  • Brand as a combination of design, messaging, and experience — all in service of a “soul” or essence that’s often intangible but unmistakable.
  • Visual identity (e.g., Island’s green) is tightly coupled to the narrative (“natural workspace”).
  • Alignment across every touchpoint, from the homepage to merch to trade show giveaways.
• Defining Brand:
  • Ari prefers “brand strategy”: the deliberate set of choices, actions, and communications that express a company’s essence.
  • Brand is also reputation, but intentionally cultivated.
  • The “soul” concept:

    “Reputation is kind of the outcome. Your soul is just who they are... It's even harder to define, which is why it's uncomfortable to talk about that in a business context.” — Ari (37:51)

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8. The 20/80 Rule of Brand Execution (38:28)

• Most Companies Do “Good Enough” Branding (the 80%):
  • Everyone has a logo, colors, some positioning — often surface-level.
• Breakout Brands Obsess Over the 20%:
  • Going deep: green headphones, every event detail, meticulously consistent experience.
  • It’s these details that make a brand memorable and distinctive.
  • Apple as an example: even how the box opens is a conscious brand choice.

“It's the last 20% that defines whether you have a brand or not... Did you build this identity into the very fabric of everything you do?” — Ari (39:10)

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9. Category Creation and Enterprise Focus

• Why Use “Enterprise” in Naming:
  • Not for sexiness, but to signal seriousness, organizational breadth, and target customer size.
  • Moving away from “secure browser” to “enterprise browser” telegraphed a bigger, more strategic product.
  • Avoiding words like “corporate” which lacked the aspirational heft.
  • Decision driven by honest signals from buyers and the need for precision in market perception.

“Enterprise was essentially saying, your whole thing. The whole organization is going to benefit from this.” — Ari (44:10)

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10. Selling and Messaging for Different Personas

• From Security to IT and Beyond:
  • The product began focused on CISOs, but soon required buy-in from CIOs and other execs due to scope.
  • Messaging evolved to address both the high-level visionaries and the “boots-on-the-ground” operators.
  • Decision: lead with the vision, then layer in day-to-day tangible benefits for adoption.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On True Category Creation:
  “You're either a category because what you built is a new thing, or you're trying to be a category because you need a way to separate yourself from the competition... that's just more strategic positioning and not category creation.”
  — Ari, 07:56

• On Narrative as the Starting Point:
  “The story is the strategy. How do you not start with the words you choose to tell the story?”
  — Ari, 27:00

• On Brand Differentiation:
  “Can other people say this? Can the brand next to me come up with the very same argument? I can't do it. I have to be honest there.”
  — Ari, 16:12

• On Cognitive Behavioral Branding:
  “If I'm able to change my belief... then I will feel differently and then I'll behave differently... Imagine how you could apply that framework to branding.”
  — Ari, 31:05

• On Going Beyond Surface-Level Branding:
  “It's the last 20% that defines whether you have a brand or not... Did you build this identity into the very fabric of everything you do?”
  — Ari, 39:10

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Topic/Quote | |------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:49 | Ari’s intro: Naming Island, backstory, and brand philosophy | | 04:33 | Island’s stage, scale, and Series D context | | 07:35 | Realities of category creation vs. positioning | | 11:33 | Ari’s path to branding, agency lessons | | 15:21 | Brand as art vs. science, frameworks vs. intuition | | 18:45 | Defining narrative and product-market context (browser analogy) | | 21:54 | What does a head of brand actually do? | | 24:20 | The importance of storytelling, scripting brand narrative | | 27:00 | Deliverables: website, launch video, sales deck | | 30:49 | Cognitive Behavioral Branding explained | | 34:58 | Brand design team and visual identity | | 37:08 | Defining brand: reputation, soul, “brand strategy” | | 38:28 | The 20/80 rule of branding, going beyond the basics | | 43:22 | Why use “enterprise” in category naming | | 45:15 | Expanding target persona: CIO, CISO, and impact on messaging | | 47:45 | Summing up: key lessons and psychological meaning of color green |

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Final Thoughts

Ari Yablok walks through the complexities — and joys — of inventing a new category, laying down a template for B2B marketers seeking more than incremental gains. The conversation is a rare mix of agency rigor, founder vision, and psychological insight, wrapped in pragmatic advice for anyone—and any company—aiming to be memorable, not just known.

Connect with Ari on LinkedIn and keep an eye out for his forthcoming podcast, “Believe in Brand.”

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This summary captures the core discussions and insights from the episode, skipping over ad reads, intros, and outros, while preserving the energy and expertise of Dave and Ari.

Transcript

[Dave Gerhardt]

Hey.

[Podcast Host / Ad Voice]

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[Dave Gerhardt]

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[Dave Gerhardt]

1, 2, 3, 4.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Exit.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Exit.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right, before we. This is it. I'm. I'm excited to have this conversation. Talk a little bit about which you all have done over the past couple years. Building a brand in the cybersecurity space is a topic people want me to talk about more. Not always interview marketers, selling to marketers, which they say is air quotes. Easy. So, Ari, thanks for coming on the Exit 5 podcast. Introduce yourself and talk about the company real quick. Explain who you are, what you do, and we'll go from there.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Sure. So thanks for having me. I think I could call myself an OG back when it was the dgmg.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Oh, I love that OG alert. Okay, yeah.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

But really love what you built here. My name is Ari. I'm the head of brand for a company in the enterprise security and IT space called Island. I came to island because I named Island. Before my time at Island, I was working for an agency, I believe Dave, you know, called Atreo in Tel Aviv for my good friend and mentor Carmel. And I was the head of brand messaging there, working for the VP strategy where I was building brand stories, positioning, category creation, writing scripts, end to end website copy and naming of categories and companies. And I get a text one night from Carmel at home and he's like, you're about to do the coolest job in Atreya. You're about to name a company that's going to change everything. And I'm like, okay, cool. And I meet the founders, guys named Mike Fay and Dan Amiga, who are veterans and celebrities in this space. Mike ran McAfee and Symantec and Bluecoat, just kind of the who's who of cybersecurity. And Dan was a founder of Browser Isolation Technology, his company acquired by Mike back in the day. And they explained to me what they're building and it freaking blew my mind. And I had done many brands up till that point and we could go into it soon and I knew I had to do right by this company. And what they were doing was building something that for the world of work, especially when it comes to security, it's all about walls and gates and blocks and then the word no and just work. You go from at home, when you're on your phone and your browser and everything's kind of smooth and slick and then you go to work and everything's like two seconds behind and you have to log in before you could log in. And it's all just weighed down. And they were going to build something that undid that and set it free. And I thought, like, what's the place where you can instinctively be free, where nothing's in the way, it's just you in open air? And that was island. And it was the first idea I had pitched it. They were in and I said to myself, if you could build a brand from scratch that was going to be instantly important, this would be it. And we were off and running from there.

[Dave Gerhardt]

That's a great intro. Okay, so island is the company. And just to set some context, like how big is the company relatively, you know, stage wise? I, I, the last I saw was series D, like 175 million. I think Sequoia is involved. Just give some context to the company before we dive in.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Yeah, so we're Series D, but we're like two and a half years on the market. So we got there pretty fast. We came out of stealth and a month later had a Series A. You know, we got backed early by Sequoia and then Insight joined also early at the Series A stage and then kept re upping and re upping and we added some major players as well, like Cotu and Cisco got involved as an investor and Georgian, these kind of big, big players in the AI and the software space for just tons of money. I think we have 375 million in funding right now at a 3 billion valuation. And I think if you just take a step back from the numbers it's really about the promise here. They're not betting on. I mean, they are betting on island, but they're. They're really betting on the idea that this thing that we're building called an enterprise browser is going to be the de facto way that people will work to the point where it's not, should I use an enterprise browser, it's which one should I use? And if that applies to all businesses, then there's really no dollar amount that's too low to get in.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Was island the first company to create this, or did this concept exist before?

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

This concept in this form did not exist. There were other things called secure browsers and browser isolation technology, like I mentioned before, and mostly virtualizing the browser, but none where the browser itself was used as the interface to secure work and enable you to access the apps you need. This concept was brand new, and within a year, there was already a market and including the big giants and some little startups coming up, which kind of speaks to how promising this whole thing is.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So it makes a ton of sense. I'm a marketer, not a security and privacy guy, but I think there is this growing. You know, have you seen those? Salesforce is running all these ads right now, and they're not even selling, like, a benefit of the product. It's basically just like a fear campaign where it's Matthew McConaughey and he's in, like, a bar and he's basically, like, coming to take your data. He's been. The whole pitch is like, you know, we keep your data safe at Salesforce, and that's become the whole campaign now. I'm, like, looking at the island website and it's like, oh, this actually makes a ton of sense. Like, you have all of your team, employees, partners, whoever, like, in one browser, you can have much more control over the data and the behavior and activity there. So also so fun for you from a marketing standpoint, because I do feel like it's much more rare these days to truly be able to create a category. And, you know, a lot of the stuff that we see people talk about in Exit 5 and in other places, it's like they've begun to roll their eyes at category creation only because, like, there's just so much noise and people will try to make a category out of anything. When, like, actually you have something like island, you're like, oh, no, this actually didn't exist before. We actually are creating a category here. That is a fun challenge from a marketing standpoint.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Yeah. And I would. I would say like, if you're going about category creation out of need to define yourselves versus your competitors, you're probably not a category.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

You're probably just searching for a way to. To find some room, some separation from your competition.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Say that again and say it slower so I can understand, so I can let that soak in. Because it was good.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Okay? Yeah. So, like, you're either a category because what you built is a new thing, or you're trying to be a category because you need a way to separate yourself from the competition. And the best way to do it is use other words. And that's really just more strategic positioning and not category creation. And those are two very different things. And category creation is a whole discipline of educating a market of doing things completely the opposite of what all playbooks tell you to do. Forget SEO, because you're trying to build new language, you're trying to say new words. Although you do want to get people's attention, you know, from old keywords, but you need to bring them into your world and create it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So when I was at Drift, we created a category called conversational marketing.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Sure.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And what you mentioned is so spot on. We used to get in all these arguments with, like, demand gen people and SEO people because there was no search traffic for conversational marketing. And so we wanted to own that term, but, like, we couldn't actually capture demand from that term because there was no search volume there. Then we had to play this weird game, but, like, all the traffic was actually coming from terms like live chat. That's where all the traffic was. But we didn't want, from a brand standpoint, we didn't want to be perceived as live chat because it's a different thing. And so it's like, how do you own this category? But then, like, build SEO at the same time? And it's like, you have to play this game where you're like, you might need to write, you know, try to rank for live chat, but then you're writing articles about, like, how this is not your grandfather's live chat or something like that. You mentioned something there. Strategic positioning versus category creation. Are you of the belief that, like, you can pick either? You know, there's some people out there who are like, either you're creating a category or you're a moron. Sounds like in your voice. It's just an approach that you can choose to take. You could have strategic positioning or you could have category creation. I'll give you an example. I'm building a business called Exit 5. I don't think we need to create a new category. We don't. My mission is to build the number one community for marketing and soon sales. Spoiler alert. And so I don't think we need to create a category. I don't think we need to call it something new. I think we can be strategically positioned to own that space. Am I guessing what you're going to say? A little bit, yeah.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Your positioning is ruler. You are the ruler over your space. The number one is your position. And you could be the easiest one, you could be the most accessible. You could be the one for executives.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Like those are, obviously your product has to match, you know, the argument you're making. But that's a position within a well defined category, which is a marketing community.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Or B2B marketing community. Even B2B could be the positioning.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

A category is saying there are things out there that you're buying. We are not one of those things. We are a thing that you've never bought before. You don't even know you need it because it didn't exist. We need to now explain to you why you need this and what it could do for you and maybe why you don't need other things as a result. So you know the same way. Salesforce, if we go back to that classic example of building a new category of SaaS, essentially where you used to have to buy software, that's a bad idea. Now this is a new thing where you don't buy software, you subscribe to it and you don't need to own it, because that's a mess.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I like that. All right, so let's talk about. I want to go rewind a little bit back into some of your lessons from before joining this company, you worked at a branding and creative agency. How did you figure out how to do brand and what does that mean to you?

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

I'm so glad you asked that because.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Oh, thank you. I do this often. Thank you. Thank you.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Yeah, you should do this like full time and stuff.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Hey, what do you, you know, about an hour? I spend about an hour in a week.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Have you considered yet? So I have a degree in social work. I started my career at a university in nonprofit community building student programming. I was not a brander at all. And I know that you've had a few guests on your, you know, on your podcast that have similar stories where they kind of arrived here. They didn't start here. And when I realized kind of I needed to make a different carve a different path in my career, I had always been A fan of tech, I was always interested in creative and inspiring people. That's really kind of the Nexus or the common denominator. I wanted to inspire. And I found that creating kind of messages that moved people was what I would love to do. And I started in a startup in this world, in a startup called Saludo that actually doesn't exist anymore, doing kind of smaller branding projects and product content and working in content teams. And then I moved to Atreya once I realized that I wanted to go all in on brand. And there is. When I was in the room with CEOs and CMOs veterans of this space who wanted to take their products to the next level, who were launching all new technologies like quantum computing and things like that. And I was in the war room with them, kind of going through the back and forth of, can I say that to my customers? Is that creative but totally off brand for, you know, how we want to behave and be. And I saw kind of that how these messages resonate with them and how it couldn't just be a creative idea, but it needs to be something that move their business that really kind of brought them somewhere. And through all that back and forth and watching some experts in the field, people like Carmel Yoeli, who I mentioned before, the CEO of Atreyau, and my VP strategy, Shira Baraka, who was there, a veteran of the space. And then I was given the reins. I kind of was told, okay, start building stuff and pitch it to the CEOs yourself and kind of think the whole concept through start to finish. And that's when I really started to find my, my place here.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Something that I struggle with is like, I think there we're. We're in like the frameworkification era, where everybody wants to, you know, there's a particular framework for positioning, right. Or there's a particular framework for naming. And actually, I always thought it was Atrio, but Atreo, there you go. They did the first website for me for initially dgmg and helped me create a brand and, and the style, and it was great. And it was actually a really interesting exercise that we did where they basically asked me a bunch of questions on the way in. And then like, we kind of did a call that was like, interactive, and I was asked to, like, move some things in a PowerPoint, like on a slider to get a brief for me on, like, you know, how much risk, Like, I don't know if risk was one, but, like, you know, how much of this do you feel versus this? Which style do you Relate to this or this. And it was. I really like that. As an input on the way in. We also talked a bunch about, like, brand archetypes, and I think that's a useful exercise. But I also kind of feel like the way that I think about things as a marketer is seemingly like how you came up with the name Island. You kind of just have an intuition, and you have done this for a while, and there's not necessarily a framework. Do you feel like you need to follow a framework to build a brand and to create the guidelines for something and to create this brand? Or like, what if you're just out on a walk one day and boom, you get the idea and that is the one liner that becomes the thing. Like, I want to just talk about how much of this is art and how much of this is science and having a process.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Let's put it this way. You can't start from zero and just come up with as many good ideas as you can and hope one of them feels right. I don't think you could start from nothing. You have to know what you're searching for. But there is no formula. There is no. At least not that I'm aware of. GPT that you plug in the right questions and it will give you the answer. Here's your new strategic positioning. Here's your narrative. It's never been done before, right? The nature of what we're doing. And maybe this is the point that I'm getting at. The nature of what we're doing is I need to come up with a story around what I am offering the world that has never been told before, which reflects the fact that this is a product that you've never been sold before. So if I'm selling you something new but the story is the same, or there is no story, then why do you exist? What are you doing here?

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right?

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

So the story needs to reflect the newness of the thing that you're trying to sell. So by definition, there is no formula that gets you something new, right? That is the essence of creation. Something from nothing. So, yes, you're putting different ideas together. You're usually the way great artists steal, right? You're usually finding ways to reinvent and reimagine ideas and concepts that are out there. But what you need to arrive at is something new. And if it feels the same. And I just, you know, I was in a couple meetings. We're working on some really big creative stuff moving forward. And the first thing I asked myself was, can other people say this? Can the brand next to me come up with the very same argument. And it's believable that I can't do it. I have to be honest there.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I like that as a, as a litmus test. Right. Can anybody else claim the thing that we're talking about? I feel like out of all of the things we talk about, strategic positioning and category creation, the one missing ingredient I see in a lot of startups in this space is the differentiator. And what's hard is like, I don't think that a differentiator can be made up by the marketer. I think that it has to be embedded in the company's DNA. I think a marketer like you or me could come into a company and we could tell you like some ideas of things that we might have. But I don't think that company is eventually going to work out. Whereas the successful companies that I've been around or advised or done consulting with, it's like the founders had a clear vision or like in the example of island, like there is no enterprise browser, does not exist. We are going to create that and this is the category we're going to build.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Yeah. So I want to dive into that point because it's so important. We are not telling a story that doesn't exist. We're just trying to frame the existing story properly. And the existing story being why this company exists. You know, you've talked about this, you wrote a book about this, Right. So with the case of island, our product is exists. If I could take just a few seconds to explain. Our product exists because the world of enterprise work has shifted to web based work, which means it's all on a browser. And yet the browser, the one place where all work is happening, was never built for work. And that has caused enterprises to have to spend millions of dollars, hire entire IT and security teams, do crazy hula hoop backflip things just to get a browser to do the things that it would have done if it was designed for the enterprise to begin with. It's like just retrofitting. You know, an example is like imagine if you wanted to drive a Camry into a war zone. Like what would you have to do to a Toyota Camry to make it ready for war?

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Not to get military. Like, it's a great car. It's the number one selling car year after year. It's just not for that. And what you need is a Humvee.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right?

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Like that's what you need. Go get that. And then you're good. So that concept of oh if you build it in, if you design the browser so that it's doing what you want to do to begin with, your world just got simple. Your workspace is now natural. You're not doing anything unnatural to it. Suddenly the story emerged from that. So now we're saying the words the natural workspace work as it should be. You're building it in instead of bolting it on, which is the second section on our homepage.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Then we think of like this is the evolution. We're going. Instead of kind of this tack on environment, we're going a built in environment. That's where this phrase from, from our hero of the homepage works. Natural next step, which is something came up with down the hall, right? Where we're bringing this evolution of work that, that it's, that's more natural, the way it's meant to be. And all of those decisions on our brands, including our color scheme, including our booth experience at a trade show, including the type of blog posts we choose to write about and the ones we don't, including our language, we don't use the word risks and threat, landscape and attacks. And we're a cyber company.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

So how could we delete that from our vocabulary? No, because we are the natural way to work. And if you are put yourself in the natural environment, then you're by definition not at risk. And we wanted to put you in that world, draw you into that world and build it so that you're in it. And full circle. That's what category creation really is. Building a world that other people can now live in.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I love that. That's very good. By the way, did you, are you wearing your island green headphones and island green pulp matching shirt today? You're very for the brand guy. You are very on brand.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

I feel this pressure all the time to kind of show up the right way. There was one day I didn't like wear a logo shirt to meeting and I see I was like the brand guy. Really? The brand guy?

[Dave Gerhardt]

So, so what's the role of the brand guy? What do you own? What are your deliverables? Maybe what were the first initial deliverables? Joining the company because you know, brand can touch everything. You gotta come up with the website. You got the website, you got the visual identity, you got the copy, you got the sales deck. There's, there's lots of things. And the role evolves over time. So maybe let's talk about what that initial role was and what is the role of a startup head of brand.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Sure.

[Dave Gerhardt]

What's the job also, I think it's unique. I also think, I don't think everybody should go and hire a head of brand as a startup. I think just if we kind of replay your backstory, like you had a unique set of skills working at this agency that was helping this company and then there was an opportunity to go in house and own this full time. I think this, what you're doing was essentially my job as head of marketing at a, at a, you know, earlier stage company. But I think I, I don't want people, I think, you know, this is the fun part about early stage marketing to me is like you can, you kind of got to figure out the ingredients and make this thing up, up as you go. It's like, you know, Ari didn't need to be head of marketing or head of X. There was a unique match opportunity. But that aside, I do want to like dig into the deliverables and the things you, you do and create and take ownership of.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Yeah. So we, you know, our unique set of circumstances was we knew early on that brand would be even more important than lead gen and classic kind of marketing, funnel marketing functions. Because our enterprise sales team, we're having high level calls with CISOs. We weren't going to go grab them on a display ad. We really needed to educate on a new story and the brand was going to do that. So that's very unique. Most startups get going and saying hey, we need people clicking on stuff and buying stuff and that wasn't my job because we didn't need that as much as we needed to kind of build this story out. So the first steps was we needed to decide on a category enterprise browser was a conversation that we had among leaders and I was in that room and we, we had other options and we needed to come up with that. Then we needed to build the strategic narrative around it. The story, the one that I pitched a few minutes ago of the browser is where work happens. But it was never designed for work.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

That was a story we, that I wrote on a Google Doc that we needed to vet with our founders and our executive leadership at the time. And we started to turn that into the basis for essentially what become our homepage and our sales deck and our pitch and, and all that. Obviously different variations and dialing it up and down.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Oh, I love that. This is how I work. This is similar way how I work. I always struggle to like go right into the deliverable. Like I think I, I don't like the format of like going to build the deck First, I always kind of write out, like, a script and almost a narrative, and I like to, like, socialize it with everybody, get them on board, then that gets translated. And I like this even more than, like, a positioning framework. I like to just write it all out. Hey, let me just tell the room. Like, hey, I want to. I want to read something to you. I like to read it. I like, like, literally, like a script. I'm like, let me read. I'm already. Except you're the founder, right? I report to you. I want to read you something. I wrote. Like, we're talking about defining our category. I want to read you something, and I'm just gonna. I want you just to shut up for a little bit. I'm gonna read it, and then we're gonna talk about where this go, and I'll get your feedback, incorporate that feedback. Then you go and then create the sales deck, create the website. People get stuck on each of those deliverables, and, like, the website is going to be different than the sales deck, and the sales deck is going to be different than maybe, like, the boilerplate. And, like, you get too into the details, and I feel like the. The delivery vehicle often ruins the overall story. So much of our, like, early success at drift in writing the narrative was literally David, the CEO, and I in a room. He's pacing back and forth. I'm like, his. He's the president. I'm the speechwriter. You know, he's pacing back and forth, and we're going line by line writing this thing out. So is that. Is that what you did? Was this, like, your. Your Don Draper moment? Like, let me. Let me read you this script that I wrote to the room of the founders.

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[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

It existed in some form like that. Now I have a founder who's just a master of storytelling and of sales. He's just a killer. I don't know, I've never met anyone like him. Mike Fay. So he had really strong storytelling skills before I showed up. And what I did was refine that. I wanted us to choose words. I want us to make decisions. What not to say, which I say over and over again is such an underrated part of branding. We will not say these words. We will not say the story this way. We will choose this before, say this part before that part. All of those are decisions that we needed to kind of concretize. And yes, there was a pitch of this story to the founder. He gave me some notes, he said, I like this, I don't like that. We decided on it and we even turned it into an early video of him kind of presenting it with a PowerPoint behind him. And then it started to go from there into, okay, does this turn into a messaging map? Does this turn into the skeleton for our homepage like we just said? So there was that moment. And this does really validate the idea that I've heard over and over on this podcast, which is the story, is the strategy. How do you not start with the words you choose to tell the story? It's, you know, there's the building blocks of. What I learned at Atreya is like this. You cannot delete that from the process. If you want to talk about frameworks like, you cannot get rid of that. If you want to come up with an original idea, it has to fit into a narrative. Or else you're just saying we're better or we're faster or you're just. You can't start the conversation.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right, so. So you start with this initial Google Doc, this script. You also mentioned another important key ingredient which I also think dictates your role, which is like a strong founder who's really good at sales and master storyteller. So you're trying to channel that. Then. Then what? How does this go from you writing a. A narrative in a Google Doc to, like, the sales deck, the website? What is the. Let's. Let's dive into the things that you are responsible for as head of brand.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Sure. The next two big things that I was directly responsible for building was the website and our launch video, which is essentially our story, just with an animated visualization around it. Those obviously are kind of table stakes to get off the ground. We needed people to know that we're a legit entity and that if you wanted to find out what we were doing in two minutes or less, we had an easy destination for that right there. The sales deck had already been a work in progress quite a bit because there had been a lot of talks with investors and with early CISOs and executives around this idea. This was a year in the making before we were even in stealth mode. We were in pre stealth mode, you know, shopping this idea around before I showed up. So I, I had the luxury of kind of walking in and saying, okay, there's already some skeleton work here to do. But we started to use that story framework as the first. I call it the narrative section of the sales deck. And we, you know, kind of optimize the messaging there around that. So we have our sales deck. We had our website, which was our homepage, our product page, our about page. We didn't have a blog yet. And we had our press page because we want. We were going to be launching with some press, and then we had the video launching. Those were kind of like the first staple assets you need if you don't have that hard to convince people that you're running a company.

[Dave Gerhardt]

How do they know if you're doing a good job?

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

So they have to feel good about it. They have to feel good. They, as in my stakeholders, the founders, the leadership team, that this represented them well. The strongest answer to that is if it was founded on a strong and a solid foundation of strategy, then you know what you're doing makes sense. You know what you're doing has logic to it, has strategy behind it. And ultimately there is no alternative that you can say has a statistically higher likelihood of working over this.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

So ultimately it does come down to belief and maybe a good segue in a plug. I'm about to launch it a podcast called Believe in Brand. Because it does come down to you need to know what you're believing in and go forward with that because you won't be able to measure it before it's out there. You need to know why you're doing something, build off of that. And I could give you a framework around that, like why you know it works. And actually drawing from the world of psychology, if you're up for that.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah, let's do that. Yeah, please.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

There is something in the world of psychology called cbt, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It's one of the most commonly used therapies right now to treat anxiety, depression, and a whole list of common mental health issues. And I believe that is the perfect framework for knowing you have a good brand. And I call it Cognitive Behavioral Branding. And the way it works is as follows. It's actually quite simple. Think about a triangle. The top of the triangles are actions. One other corner of the triangles are feelings, and the third corner is our beliefs. This is a cycle that we are constantly going through. Our beliefs influence our feelings, our emotions, which influence our actions. So the way to change an action, right, if, let's say every time I see someone walking down the street, I have social anxiety, I cross the street just so that I don't walk near them. I can't just say, don't do that anymore. That doesn't work. I have to change the way I feel when I am in that situation. But I can't just tell myself to feel differently. That's not how people work. What I have to do is really change the way I believe in that situation. I believe someone's going to look at me and laugh at me if they see me on the street or someone's going to insult me. And because of that, when I walk near them, I feel anxious. And because of that, I cross the street. So if I'm able to change my belief, actually I have some self worth. Actually, I don't think anyone's going to hurt my feelings today because it doesn't matter what they say, right? There are whole sorts of ways to change beliefs. Then I will feel differently and then I'll behave differently and imagine what, how you could apply that framework to branding. All we're doing in marketing is trying to influence behavior, right? I need to get you to click on stuff so that you enter my pipeline, so that you become a qualified lead, so that we can get you on some sort of buyer journey. So that I could tell my board that marketing money is well spent.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right?

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

All that starts with action. But I can't just get you to act. I got to get you to want to act. I got to influence your feelings. But I can't just tell you to want to act. I have to influence your beliefs. And your beliefs are, I think I need this. I think this is the future. I think I can't continue the way I have gone until now. These are all things that I could believe. And when I believe it, I will feel something about it. And when I feel something about it, I will do it. It's just science. It's how we work. And that's really where I could test how I used to test. You know, is this a good strategy? Is this getting me to believe differently or is this just getting me to superficially act differently? Because then I'm not really building a category or giving, putting a different position in the market out there. I'm just trying to get you to click and it's not going to work. It's not sustainable. So that's one way that I say to myself, is this working or not?

[Dave Gerhardt]

Then over time you'll obviously be able to measure, you know, adoption of this category. Like the more people searching for enterprise browser, the more enterprise browser gets mentioned in certain reports and articles, the more people coming inbound and mentioning the need for this thing, I think the signals become a little bit more obvious. But you know, I asked about measurement, but also I feel like when you're doing something like creating a category here, the measurement is going to be, is going to come down the road. It's not a short term thing. It's like everyone has to be bought in. I think I've seen smaller startups make mistakes where like you kind of are playing whack a mole. This goes back to what we talked about the beginning. Whack a mole with category creation. It's like, let's try this category. Okay, it wasn't that, let's try this category. It's like this company is built around the idea of enterprise browser. That is not going to change exactly. Maybe how the website looks and feels. That's going to change. Right? But this is why, you know, I always said like that quote that I have, which is like life's too short to work for a CEO who doesn't get marketing. So much of marketing success is about the founders and executives and whoever runs the company being, being bought in and being bought into a long term seeing marketing as a long term strategy. That's, that's why you were brought in as head of brand in the early days. It wasn't to, you know, get the first customers. It was to create this like long lasting brand that you know, you'll have. Let's talk about the definition of brand a little bit. In your role, do you also, do you own like the visual side of this brand also?

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

So we have a brand design team that the best way of defining it is they're adjacent to me. I don't manage them in the sense that they work under me, but I manage their projects, I manage what they work on. And yeah, design goes hand in hand with our brand strategy and messaging and the decisions we make around how to present ideas visually across social, across content experiences. About big part of our design as a brand. You know how we show up at trade shows. Our company specifically has a big emphasis on showing up face to face events. We do literally several hundred events a year, which is insane to even say out loud. And how our brand shows up in those events is key because they get to feel like they're stepping into our world, like I said. And design is a huge part of that.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So design is a huge part of it. They work in parallel to if you have a project. Like ultimately if, if you as a company wanted to change the look and feel of the website, would you be leading that project? Would that project come to you as head of brand to lead and then change with the creative team as your partner?

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Yeah, that would be me and the design lead and our CMO kind of agreeing that we need to go in a new direction or it's time. And we just did that recently with our kind of re. Rebranding of our homepage and ultimately our website.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Got it. So brand is the, there is the visual side of brand, but there's also, I don't know if it's lowercase B, capital B. There's also brand, which I think of as like the company's reputation. And I think what's cool about your role as head of brand, it's not like you're not head of branding, you're not head of, you know, you're not in charge of the colors and the fonts. You were head of the brand, which I interpret that as the company's reputation. Do you have a way that you define brand? Because I often will find myself in the middle of discussions about, like, brand marketing, which is like, there's, there's kind of multiple definitions of these things. There's like, brand marketing, which people see as, like, doing billboards, but then there's brand, which is the reputation of the company, maybe. You seem like a very thoughtful guy. Like, can we, can we try to define brand in this context for people?

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Yeah, I think there's like one comfortable way and one uncomfortable way I think about it. The comfortable way is I would, you know, I like to use the words brand strategy together and maybe let's just take the word brand out of it for a second. I know that's a loaded word, strategy, but that's really what it's about. Like, strategy just means what is the deliberate course of action or set of actions that we're going to take for how we are going to present ourselves to the outside world visually is one part of it the sales deck? Why are we even talking about a sales deck in a brand conversation? Why? Because that is the strategy for how we communicate value.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Why we need to exist and why you need to give us your money. All of these touch points really come back to why.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

The strategy, I like to also call it the soul, which isn't, you know, reputation is kind of the outcome. Like, if you know someone's what they are in their essence, your soul is just who they are. It's even harder to define, which is why it's uncomfortable to talk about that in a business context. No one really used that word, but I like it because it's like the less tangible stuff, the less measurable stuff. It doesn't weigh anything, but it's there. And you know it because you, you, you could kind of get right to the essence of it. And it's easy for me to think about what I do that way.

[Dave Gerhardt]

What else should we talk about as it relates to. To brand? I got some questions, but I want to give you an opportunity to help me drive a little bit.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Yeah, sure. So I just, I just talked about today on LinkedIn, put a thought out there called the 2080 rule. We know the 8020 rule, right? Of like, 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Pareto principle.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, like, to me, there's a 2080 rule with brand, which is many people think that the way to build a brand is to just have a brand, and as long as you have it, it's Good. But that's the 80% that's like everyone is doing 80% of brand. You pick the color, you pick the tagline, it's great. It's not great. It's there.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

You pick the position whether it was really thought out or not. Everyone has one. You go to a trade show, everyone thought of something.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

It's the last 20% that defines whether you have a brand or not, whether the, the rest of that 80% is actually a brand. And the last 20% is. Did you build this identity into the very fabric of everything you do? Did you go as far as to think my headphones should be green?

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Did you go as far as thinking like, what are we giving out at a dinner party? If my brand as a person, what am I giving out at a dinner party as kind of like a nice little gift? Is it a squeeze ball?

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Is it a stress ball? Probably not. So then why are we all giving out stress balls?

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

So if you think about it all the way to the end of who am I? What kind of behaviors do I do? What are the accents around my brand? That's when people start to notice everything. Before that, people don't notice your brand because you just exist and nothing more than that. And it's really that last 20% as opposed to the first 20 that that are the brands that we remember that they thought of. You know, the way the box opens on the iPhone.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

And that all of that was just extra thinking that no one else thought mattered. And yet turns out it matters more than everything else.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah. And I mean you're, you're in the position to do that.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Like as a, this is the back to the point of category creation. If you were a small bootstrapped, you know, little SaaS app, like you'd have to make some trade off decisions and be like, ah, that's probably not worth us. But if you're island and you have this big ambitious vision of creating a category, creating the enterprise browser, you know, you've raised $300 million in funding to obviously have some type of 10x multiple on that, then that's the playbook. I, I do find like earlier stage startups there kind of, you can't really play in between both of those things. You have to decide like, are you the scrappy startup and you're going to go for this? You know, here's the outcome you're looking for or you have to be intentional. I've, I see kind of people like they want to do what island is doing, but they don't have the long term, 10, 20 year vision and funding and like, and ambition to go and do that. And so you got to really be intentional about the stage and opportunity you have.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I think that's probably what drew you to the company. It wasn't like, yeah, we're going to build this like browser app and we're going to try to flip it in two years and like come help us do that.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Yeah, I mean this, the story was kind of built in. Like I could, I saw it from the very beginning that like this was meant to be significant and I think that's an important word. Like are you selling a product or are you trying to make a significant change in the world? And usually a founder, usually founders are thinking the latter and the product is just the means of making a significant change, especially if they're repeat founders. Right. If they're second, third founders who are still early in their startup, they're still thinking, I'm doing this because something matters here, something needs to change here. And that's why I think I don't fully believe what I'm about to say. But it's like you either get it or you don't. Do you know what I mean? Like you either get that brand starts from day zero or you either, or you get it way too late. And then at some point you're just paying Pentagram to like slap on a skin on your brand and you hope that people believe it.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right?

[Dave Gerhardt]

Sure, yeah. I mean, I think you, yeah, you get it or you don't. I'm, I'm building a company. We're not investing in brand at the level that say island is. But I believe in brand and for me brand is how we act, how we talk, the type of things that we do. Like we have a brand at exit 5. It's different than, than brand at the stage of Island. And I, I don't have a framework for that, but I've just been doing it and I have a vision for what I want us to do and a certain level of expectation and I want it to sound like this and look like this. And yeah, you either get it or you don't. Two follow ups for you. This will be interesting for people. One discussion. That one question that comes up often is the use of the word enterprise when selling to the enterprise. And it's something that you all have used quite intentionally.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Yes.

[Dave Gerhardt]

What's your recommendation or advice there? And my friend Pranav runs a company called Paramark and they're a measurement and attribution startup. And he had once asked for some advice about, like, hey, we're going after enterprise. Like, do we say enterprise? Do we not? Do we not? So I'm kind of asking, I want to hear how you arrived at that conclusion for this business.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Sure. So there are a couple of important kind of signals we needed to take in to make this decision. Enterprise is an old word. It's not a sexy word. It's not a modern word either. So we were using it because we wanted to intentionally move away from certain other words and we wanted to send a certain signal to who we were talking to. We wanted to move away from the concept of secure browser, of bottling ourselves up with just being a security offering, because it's way bigger than that. And we've heard our customers say, like, whoa, I thought you guys were just like an extra secure browser. That's like just the beginning. And we needed to send the signal that this was something that influenced all business operations. Like everything you were doing in your business and enterprise was essentially saying your whole thing. The whole organization is going to benefit from this. And that was an important point. And the word enterprise also was talking to the size of the company we were going after. This was going to be the most beneficial, the most value is going to be delivered the bigger the enterprise you were. So if we were, you know, there was another competitor that came out that called themselves the corporate browser. And to me, that had like all of the bad things of what enterprise is and none of the good things, because corporate just means like, old and boring and like buttoning the top button and, you know, nothing else besides that. So enterprises, it should just be signaling. This is the size company that I want to target. This is the level of business that I want to ask for when I'm going for budget line. And for us, it was, I want to separate from some misconceptions around being just the security browser or just, you know, solving certain use cases and not others.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Let's talk about your core. Is your. Are you selling to, like it security developers?

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Who.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Who are you selling to?

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Oh, this is such a good conversation. We initially targeted the chief security officer ciso. They had the most immediately to gain because everything they were doing was just too expensive. The stack was way too big. What would happen in this sales process was we would get on the phone with the ciso, their minds would be blown, and then they would say, I can't authorize a browser purchase. That's asking the entire organization to change their browser. That's An IT decision. Even if I get value out of this, I need to bring the CIO into this conversation. And then we have the CIO getting on the next demo and. And we've literally had companies who are in the procurement process and the only step left was arguing over whose budget this was going to come out of because it benefited them equally. So it's a weird problem to have, but it's almost a blessing. You know, we'll take that problem. But yeah, this started as a security kind of sell, but it's way bigger than that now.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Do you feel like that Persona, is that going to dictate how you do marketing? So, for example, like selling to marketing and sales is going to look and feel different than selling to that audience. Do you feel like that plays an important role in the defining this brand?

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Absolutely. We've had conversations about this where there are certain executives that care more about day to day and just need you to explain to them how this is going to, bottom line, benefit them on a day to day level. And there are other executives that are the visionaries that their goal is to kind of make their mark on the company. And often they know, like, I'm here for four years, I want to hang my hat on something.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Whether there's an actual deadline or not. But we needed to decide, do we want to be visionary in the type of change we're bringing to your entire organization, or did we want to lead with a message that was more boots on the ground? Here's what changes for you tomorrow. Here are all the, you know, the objections that you have that we could solve for you right now that we could get out of the way. And we really need to do a mixture of both. But we started at the highest level because our cio, we made a decision. That person needed to get the signal that this was a big, revolutionary change for them and we needed to get their attention on that. So our hero of our homepage had that vision and then we immediately brought them in the weeds of here's what this is going to do for you. So we had to balance those two things out immediately.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right, Ari, this is great, Great to have you on. I got a bunch of notes. I'm excited we did this. I got early stage brand building. We talked about naming, we talked about bringing a new concept to the market. We talked about the role of head of brand, strategic positioning and category creation, selling to security, definition for brand, the importance of the color green. Green is. Green is a good. Isn't there like some psychological, like Green means like wealth and happiness or something like that, right?

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Growth, Safety. Yeah, growth.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Green is growth.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

And green was natural. It was perfect for us talking about the natural place for work. So there was a hand in hand in there.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Love that. Well, good to see you. I heard, I heard a rumor that you might be joining us for. For Drive in in September, which is a big deal, but you're in Tel Aviv. It's nighttime. We could have done a whole podcast on your six children, but we'll save that for for another episode. Looking forward to meeting you in person. I'll see you in September. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Appreciate it. Yeah, I can't wait.

[Dave Gerhardt]

We'll put your LinkedIn here, people connect with you, send you nice notes and I'll see you around the community. Right.

[Ari (Head of Brand at Island)]

Appreciate it, Dave.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right.

[Co-host or Guest Interjector]

Exit.

[Ad Voice]

Email, in my humble opinion, is still the greatest marketing channel of all time. It's the only way you can truly own your audience today. But when it comes to building those emails. Well, if you've ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know just how painful that can be. I won't name names, but templates get too rigid. Editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever when it shouldn't.

[Dave Gerhardt]

That's why we love knack here at exit 5.

[Ad Voice]

Knack is a no code email platform that makes it easy to create on brand high performing emails without the bottlenecks. If you're frustrated by clunky email builders, you need nack. If you're tired of hoping the email.

[Podcast Host / Ad Voice]

You sent looks good across all devices.

[Ad Voice]

Just test it in Nack first. And if you're a big team that's making it hard to collaborate and get approvals on your email, you definitely need nac. The best part, everything takes a fraction of the time. You can see NAC in action at nac.com exit5. That's knock.com exit5. Or just let them know you heard about knack from exit5.

[Dave Gerhardt]

That's us.