AI Visibility, Founder Branding and the Minimum Viable Visibility System with Gal

Summary

Episode Summary: Liftoff with Keith — “AI Visibility, Founder Branding and the Minimum Viable Visibility System” with Gal Borenstein

Date: April 28, 2026
Guest: Gal Borenstein, CEO & Founder of the Borenstein Group
Host: Keith Newman

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Keith Newman sits down with Gal Borenstein, a veteran branding and communications strategist for tech firms and government contractors, to explore the new realities of trust, branding, and digital visibility in an AI-first world. Drawing on insights from Gal’s new book, “Don't Believe the Hype When Trust is on the Line,” they cover how founders and early-stage companies can build real credibility, combat misinformation, and carve out a differentiated voice in a noisy, fast-moving marketplace.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Shift in How Trust is Built and Lost (00:59–04:08)

• Transition from Human to Digital Trust:

  • Gal opens by discussing how traditional, in-person trust-building has been upended by remote work and digital interaction, especially post-COVID.
  • “Trust is on the line in a way that it's never been before…What Trust is now is not the narrative that you're putting out there. It's now owned by what people say about your brand on the outside and you do not control it.” – Gal (02:44)

• Loss of Internal Culture & Control:

  • With distributed teams and minimal face-to-face interactions, maintaining an internal company culture that fosters trust has become much tougher.
  • Not only customers, but also employees, vendors, and the broader digital public now shape your brand’s trustworthiness.

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2. The Anthropic & OpenAI Government Crisis — A Case Study (04:08–08:54)

• Transparency and Crisis Management:

  • Keith brings up the recent high-profile incident where AI companies had to decide how transparent to be with the Federal Government.
  • Gal sees this as a crisis communication challenge more than a privacy battle: “What happened is the White House, for its own reasons, decided they're going to change their system or that they don't trust the government contractor at the time…” – Gal (05:24)
  • Initial responses of “no comment” gave way to broader public debate as the stakes for privacy and transparency grew quickly.

• Information as the Most Valuable Asset:

  • “Information is more important than people. Information is more important than customer experience. Everything is basically switching to thinking about information as a very highly monetized coin, if you will, much bigger than the Bitcoin.” – Gal (08:10)

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3. The New Trust Risks for Founders & How to Build Credible Brands (08:54–13:37)

• Modern Trust Risks:

  • The rise of AI, data scraping, and relentless privacy breaches mean trust is more fragile than ever.
  • Extreme examples like the downfall of 23andMe highlight the perils of mis-managed data and privacy.

• Need for Transparency:

  • “How to basically be transparent and to collaborate, to create technologies that are not invasive yet give you information that, for example, can help solve a cancer treatment that cannot be solved without sharing information…” – Gal (11:10)
  • Leaders must balance openness with robust privacy protection, and realize markets—not founders—ultimately determine winners.

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4. Navigating Noise and Building Authentic Visibility as a Founder (13:37–19:23)

• Overreaching vs. Authenticity:
  • Many early-stage founders, desperate for attention, risk overhyped marketing stunts that can backfire and erode trust.
  • Keith: “Sometimes it causes me to try to overreach and do something big…those forced kind of marketing activities, sometimes they work and other times they don’t.” (13:51)

Gal’s “Three Key Strategies” for Founders

1. Find Your Niche:
   • “No, you can't start a company and not know what your niche is and where you compete against companies that you can win against. Like a David vs a Goliath.” – Gal (16:16)
   • Pitfall: Claiming “no competition” or only big firms as competitors = lack of market understanding.
2. Differentiate (with Real Proof):
   • “When you use the word innovation, to actually have something to back it up…if you can’t put together a sentence that begins with ‘Unlike companies X, Y and Z, our company does this, this, and that differently,’ you really don’t have the differentiation.” – Gal (17:16)
3. Targeted Marketing:
   • Focus on a handful of “reference customers” instead of spreading efforts too thin—quality trumps quantity in early adoption.

• Modern Branding:
  • The “narrative is no longer yours.” Word-of-mouth, third-party reviews (like Glassdoor and G2), and employee voices define brand reputation more than company messaging.

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5. The Most Dangerous Mistake Founders Make (19:23–20:38)

• Overconfidence Without Evidence:
  • “Never assume that your technology or your product is better than someone else's unless you have proof positive that it is.” – Gal (19:44)
  • Gal’s key advice: Negative feedback from skeptics and dissatisfied users is “free consulting” and “gold,” if you’re bold enough to listen and learn rather than retreat into ego.

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6. The Minimum Viable Visibility System & Internal Alignment (21:39–27:10)

• Footprint and Authority Building:

  • In a post-COVID, AI-first era, even very small companies can establish thought leadership through consistent digital content—whitepapers, blogs, LinkedIn posts.
  • “It doesn’t really matter how many employees you have. It’s what you’re saying and sending as a signal to the market that says this company has ideas and actually they have original thoughts.” – Gal (22:04)

• Dealing with Social Media Trolls and Negative Publicity:

  • Social media is a double-edged sword. If you don’t actively respond or tell your story, trolls and misinformation define your brand by default.
  • “If you don’t respond to those injuries and you don’t generate new content about your company culture… you’re really not taking advantage of the fact that social media can be your friend.” – Gal (23:31)

• Aligning Internal Culture:

  • Disconnect between company leadership’s “core values” and what employees actually believe leads to credibility loss. Everyone wears the brand—from factory floor to C-suite.
  • Memorable example: Two technicians badmouthing their employer during an on-site repair—“That disgruntled employee times two now becomes the brand because they put the label of the company…right on that cooling unit.” – Gal (26:11)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Trust is on the line in a way that it's never been before.” – Gal (00:59)
• “Information is more important than people…Everything is switching to thinking about information as a very highly-monetized coin.” – Gal (08:10)
• “Never assume that your technology is better unless you have proof positive that it is.” – Gal (19:44)
• “Negative customers…can give you the real reason they don’t think your product works. Those objections you turn into gold.” – Gal (20:09)
• “It doesn’t really matter how many employees you have. It’s what you’re saying and sending as a signal to the market that says this company has ideas.” – Gal (22:04)
• “That disgruntled employee…now becomes the brand.” – Gal (26:11)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:59 — Gal on the new reality of trust
• 04:08 — The OpenAI/Anthropic crisis and crisis communication
• 09:30 — Risks for founders in the trust economy
• 13:37 — Strategies for visibility and authenticity for early-stage founders
• 15:08 — Three strategies: Niche, differentiation, reference customers
• 19:43 — Most dangerous mistake: Overconfidence without customer proof
• 21:39 — Building authority; the Minimum Viable Visibility System
• 26:11 — The $5,000 repair that became a $50,000 problem (employee stories matter)

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Listener Takeaways

• Trust is more fragile and public than ever; it’s determined by outsiders, not companies.
• Founders must combine digital transparency, proof, and humility—listening to critics is a free growth resource.
• Be deliberate in defining your niche, differentiation, and audience; don’t get distracted by noise or driven by ego.
• Social media and employee actions powerfully shape your brand—be proactive and authentic.
• Align internal culture and external messaging; brand values must be lived at every level.

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Special Offer

[27:50] – Gal offers a complimentary brand/trust assessment for listeners who reach out via LinkedIn.

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For more founder stories and growth expert interviews, visit The Look Back Podcast.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Hey, it's great to start another liftoff. At this time we in part of our great CEO interview series, we're talking with Gal Borenstein, who is CEO and founder of the Borenstein Group. And, and this interview is going to touch on a, a a different array of topics including brand resilience, digital trust and growth in an AI first world. Gal, you've spent a lot of time working with tech companies. You know a lot about government contractors from your base of operation there. And you've got a new book, so by the way, I love the title. Don't believe the Hype When Trust is on the Line. It's sort of like a playbook for founders navigating misinformation, AI noise and the trust economy. Those are my thoughts. Welcome to the show. What are your thoughts?

[A]

Thanks for having me. Number one, trust is on the line in a way that it's never been before. Because as humans, we used to think of trust as a human centric system where for example, in business we meet for lunch, we meet at a trade show, we have a conference room where we again meet each other, see each other in a way that allows us to kind of humanize the transaction, the presentation, and then comes Covid and creates an entire new world where all the human interaction is gone and the only thing that is left is to see some people putting their face on and some people refusing to put their face on. A video call with employees and worse, employees are no longer in the same spot their distributed workforce because it was cheaper and more economic. But at the same time it ruined the whole idea of having a company culture because whatever the company culture was, how do you maintain it? With a video call where you have 30 people and you can only meet with them once a week or twice a week. So out of that, doing branding and marketing strategy and executing creative for technology companies, mostly B2B and some are government contractors, as we call it, but they really are selling technology to the US government a lot, to the dod, so everything from drones to cybersecurity. What I noticed is how entire companies that had a culture and had a good reputation went through a lot of hiccups and a lot of bumps on the road, which eviscerated the idea that people can trust them. Trust used to be internal, but now, and that's kind of the, the summary of my dissertation here, as I describe in my book. What Trust is now is not the narrative that you're putting out there. It's now owned by what people say about your brand on the outside and you do not control it. So you better be aware of what are the things that you should be doing if you're a CEO, if you're an owner of a company or chief marketing officer or entrepreneur for that matter.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Knowing that your culture and your values and the promises made have to be promises kept. And if you don't identify and benchmark what it needs to be, there will be no trust or low trust level that will destroy your business or require shifting resources from actually improving your company to making sure that it's not destroyed.

[B]

Yeah. You know, Gal, that's really interesting. And it's come up with a couple of my conversations recently, the idea of trust. We have also a recent example of what's happened, right, with anthropic and OpenAI where they had to make a decision on how they would share their content, access of information to the federal government that required them opening up their kimono to do them. And, you know, moving from the conceptual framework that you shared, how do you think that was handled? Correctly, incorrectly, how would you have advised it and how do you think it was received by the different constituents, one being government, the other being commercial? And really, commercial and consumer might be viewed similarly. Right. So how do you think that was viewed and handled?

[A]

I think that there are really two answers to it. And I'm going to put my PR hat for a second and say that it was really a crisis communication issue more than a principled war for maintaining privacy. What happened is the White House, for its own reasons, decided that they're going to change their system or that they don't trust the government contractor at the time to give them what they need. And knowing that there's other companies that can do the same thing. So they didn't wait. They basically dropped it in a kind of a press conference. And the next thing you know, Claude, and behind it, perplexity and all the kind of elements of that AI system. You know, the CEO had to say something and at the beginning was like, no comment. But very quickly it had to become a bigger issue. And once it became a bigger issue, I'm going to switch my hat from pr, where typically the answer is no comment, especially when you're dealing with the largest provider and consumer of data in the world, which is the US Government. Now put the marketing hat on, and they basically focused on really kind of what is it that you're not going to have or potentially going to lose, which is privacy and the idea that, you know, big government can go and kind of pick your data and may use it against you in some form or fashion. Which is really kind of funny in one respect, because when you think about the political spectrum, typically Republicans were associated with small government and not really focusing on using anything that is private. And then it switched around. And suddenly in that particular scenario, privacy became an issue that the government basically said, we need information and we need it now to do whatever it is that we need to do. Department of Defense. Yeah, but the company, you know, Perplexity and. And its kind of proprietary units, we're working with the government on creating autonomous intelligence and access to data that typically would take hundreds of thousands of people sometimes to actually process into something that is productized, if you will. And to answer your question, nothing really changed. The only thing that changed was the name of the company that is serving it. And it's unavoidable because the new world that we live in, information is more important than people. Information is more important than customer experience. Everything is basically switching to thinking about information as a very highly monetized coin, if you will, much bigger than the Bitcoin. And if you really don't know how to kind of build trust around, will blow back on you. So that have its system hacked suddenly goes from being trusted to maybe not being trusted. Think about 18.

[B]

Let's, let's. Let's take that conversation and move it into more the general view of founders today and what they have to deal with as a. As a practice. Then in terms of how do I handle and manage trust? Because it's not something you were taught back in business school or even just other founders. It's almost like a new. Not a new issue because it's been around for security sol but it's become more broader. So what's the trust risk founders are seeing? How are they trying to build trust and a credible brand? You get involved in that.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. Because that is the definition of the product that you're putting out there.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

In the private. In the private sector, as individual citizens or consumers, we love technology. We love to have the next best thing. Think about meta glasses from Facebook, which is so exciting that you can have like a kind of a virtual world that you can see and kind of play with while wearing these sunglasses, if you will. Y And that's the good part about it. But at the same time, people are starting to ask where's the information about how it was thinking? And what I was actually watching is going, well, it's going to a data center through meta's very sophisticated mechanism of collecting information. And that information is not private because you signed on the dotted line, which is now a scroll where at the bottom of like three pages of six point letter agreement, it says this is your privacy agreement. And you agree to share information, just not your name. But then you have somebody hacked Facebook or somebody hacked Claude a month ago, and suddenly all that promise of privacy goes out the window to that level. So we're not talking even about fraud yet, because fraud is another thing that is happening at an alarming rate. And with AI, it basically expands even more. But from a perspective, to answer your question, from a perspective of what are the things that founders are dealing with is how to basically be transparent and to collaborate, to create technologies that are not invasive yet give you information that, for example, can help solve a cancer treatment that cannot be solved without sharing information about a medical procedure or DNA or whatever it may be. And yet at the same time, making sure that your name is not the key to opening information that is sensitive, that is private. So privacy, security, all these things are considered very much at the higher level of companies that are dealing with all this new technology. But the marketplace decides who wins and who loses. So think about 23andMe, which was a company that collected all the data. We, we took them to bankruptcy one way or the other. As a financial economy, they closed the shop down and then they popped up somewhere else with all the genetic information about millions of people. Well, what if somebody wants to use it for evil purposes? What does it do to your company brand if you're known for the brand debt, stole information about your genetic makeup that you never wanted to share, for example. So these are the real issues that define what trust is. But what compounds it is the lack of transparency and the lack of really kind of coming together as government industry and believing that you can together create some form of decorum and some form of consistent way of dealing with privacy issues. Because without privacy, we are in Russia. Without privacy, we are in China. And at the same time, yeah, if we don't have the information about the human genome that comes from a database that was perfected by AI, we. We won't have cancer medications. Right.

[B]

Well, g, I want to ask you a question because, you know, you and I are in sort of parallel spaces in a sense where we're counseling a lot of early stage founders. I know you work with larger companies as well, but look, these guys are having trouble getting their names out there when they're new and they, you know, have early funding, but not a ton, as is so typical out there. How do I Rise above the noise. And sometimes it quite causes me to sort of, you know, try to overreach and do something big. And those things tend to, you know, those forced kind of marketing activities, you know, sometimes they work and other times they don't. What kind of counsel do you give when that company that you've been working with for a little while, you know, they're really looking to make a splash, but now they got a battle, you know, a very noisy environment. Some things that are authentic, some things that are inauthentic, you know, bots and other other things. How do you coach them in this era of this information explosion that needs obviously a lot of discernment? I don't know. How do you, how do you sit them down and say, look, I know you want to accomplish all these things from a marketing perspective, and I know you're starting to spend more money driving, you know, customer awareness and customer adoption. But what are some of those practical things that, that you can advise founders to do in that, in that respect?

[A]

There are three key strategies that I use with companies that are starting or trying to kind of change direction. The first one is find your niche in the marketplace. When I talk to CEOs and CMOs of companies, when I do kind of my first kind of discovery meeting, if you will. Yeah. How many times have you heard them saying, when you ask the question, who's your competitors or who's your competition?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And the answer that comes back from a small company is IBM, Microsoft, you

[B]

know, well, Gal, you know which one I like more is we don't have any competition.

[A]

Well, one of these two answers, and both of them show that you haven't done even the, the, the market research to position yourself before you spend a penny. And the second one is differentiation. So number one, to answer your question, no, you can't start a company and not know what your niche is and where you compete against companies that you can win against. Like a David versus a Goliath. You can't beat Goliath before you are David equipped with some slingshots, if you will. The second really is differentiation. Differentiation requires you to, when you use the word innovation, to actually have something to back it up. Whether it's a clinical study, if you're in, in kind of the medical profession, whether it's efficacy of, of the software that you're using, the mission outcomes, whatever you want to call it, if you can't put together a sentence that begins with, unlike companies X, Y and Z, our company does this, this, and that differently, which results in better outcomes for patients, for customers, for consumers, depending on what product or service you're selling, you really don't have the differentiation. And if you don't have that, that leads to again, spending money in all the wrong places, going to big trade shows, only to be ignored because you look like a sardine when you have the next booth next to you. That is 40 by 10 versus your 8 by 10 little cubby, if you will. And, and the third is, what is your marketing strategy? Who do you want to recruit as your customers? Customers could be having three to five that actually can finance your growth and really kind of give you the reference space instead of trying to reach to thousands of prospects and getting 100 prospects into customers that take up 90% of your time and don't even say thank you, which result in bad customer experience, which result in bad pr, bad branding, and the rest follows. So these are the three things that I think everybody should pay attention to and the difference between now and then. Some of the things I just said are not new things. They're always been in marketing and branding important. But what changed is that, as I said, the narrative is no longer yours. So when you go to a trade show and present your. Your kind of, your brand and your differentiation, and you said, we're the most innovative company in the world.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then there are reviews on G2 Exchange, or if it's software or Glass Door, if it's employees that are working for you and are disillusioned by the technology, saying it doesn't really work. We never got the right installation and you ignore it and you don't listen to it anymore because you think it's noise. Wow. You're about to fall victim to either an acquisition at a very low valuation or spending a lot of money just repairing something that you could have done for free if you've done it correctly.

[B]

And I know you, you kind of covered some of this gal, but I'm going to move to my lightning round of questions. You shared with me three great things to do in that early discussion, you know, of positioning and branding and differentiation with customer competitors. What. What's the one thing you shouldn't do?

[A]

Never assume that your technology or your product is better than someone else's unless you have proof positive that it is. The best advice and the best feedback about whether your product is. Is working well or smelling well or tastes better, whatever it may be in any market. You should listen to the negative people. I know we love to tell people, don't surround yourself with negative people. Which I totally agree with. But at the same time, surround yourself by negative customers that can give you the real reason they don't think your product works. Those objections. Yeah, to turn into gold and fix the stuff before it goes to market. Yeah.

[B]

I call that free consulting.

[A]

That doesn't happen that way.

[B]

I call that free consulting advice.

[A]

Yes. But it's, it's gold. And it's gold that is right in front of me. And people miss it because their ego, whether it's the corporate ego, the entrepreneurial ego, we all want to be the best and biggest and the brightest. That's capitalism. But if you don't pay attention to what doesn't work at the beginning and you don't solicit that feedback, you are highly positioned to really kind of go to market and be laughed upon.

[B]

Yeah, you know, it's so funny too, because we were dealing a lot with trust here. We're talking about that it takes a while to acquire trust, not that long to lose it. So you really have to be careful with that. So what, what is a play out of your book or something that you have is maybe a framework or a habit that you advise on? Is there something from the book that you can share?

[A]

Gal sure. Think about that. In the new world that we live in, which basically is post Covid in a digital world, in AI world, every company really has an opportunity to create a digital footprint where it has authority, leadership. For example, if you're basically a company that is an expert in a topic that only 100 companies participate in, you have an opportunity to put up position papers, blog articles on LinkedIn, anything that essentially promotes your company as a leader in the industry. Even if you have five employees, it doesn't really matter how many employees you have. It's what you're saying and sending as a signal to the market that says this company has ideas and actually they have original thoughts. Which means maybe I should look into them and maybe they will be trusted a lot more than they are right now in the digital footprint. You today in B2B, you got to pay attention to listening to what being said about you in social media. Social media is known as the land of trolls. And every one of us have experience at some point or another having trolls or having, you know, information that is not really accurate or completely the opposite of the truth being written about and that causes injury. But if you don't respond to those injuries and you don't generate new content about your company culture, if somebody said this employer sucks and you only basically respond by saying we offer these benefits, and the person that wrote it is not correct. You're really not taking advantage of the fact that social media can be your friend because you have a chance to tell your story to a larger audience and not everyone is going to buy it, but you need to be in the driver's seat. And the third and most important is feedback, feedback, feedback not just from the outside, in your own organic culture of your company. I can't tell you how many times I go to a cybersecurity company or any manufacturer of an industrial product that is used for other means. And when you talk to the lowest level in the company, which is the most productive one, which is the staff that know is the junior staff or it's the factory workers, and you ask them, you know, what are the three things that this company stand for? They say, I don't know, these are the three, but I don't believe in it. And if that basically happens, and then you go to the executive management team and they give you a list of 10 things that are the company values, which typically includes innovation, integrity, love of the environment. That's nice to believe that that's really the company values. But unless you're doing an environmental product that is really sustainable, rather than a marketing word that says sustainable so you can fit the marketplace. If the bottom of the company does not align with what the executive management put out there, that's a big hole in your credibility. And there's a difference between being trusted or not. I want to give you a quick example that I think most of us can relate to. An AJC company came to our agency a few years ago to fix the cooling system. It was like 90 degrees in the office, just preseason, and you're just dying, and you got to have somebody come and fix it. So they come and fix it. Two technicians show up, and as we kind of continue to work throughout the day, you know, the closet where they're working is, was kind of in the center of the. Of the office, so everybody could hear anything that they were saying. And it was a diatribe of two people that complain about their company, complained about their supervisor, complain about the fact that they don't have the right parts and they have to kind of,

[B]

kind

[A]

of compromise the quality of what they're producing because the inventory management is not connected to the customer orders. And in fact, at the end of the day, we were going to leave work two hours earlier and leave without actually solving the problem, and we'll come back tomorrow. Things that ruin the trust that you have in the brand of the company that you just invited. And that disgruntled employee times two now becomes the brand because they put the label of the company, the AJC company's label, right on that cooling unit. So the result is you guess had a company that basically paid $5,000 to fix a problem, but you created a $50,000 problem as a management team.

[B]

Isn't that funny? I mean, that is so true. And people, the littlest things will cause you to lose trust or help you to strengthen your brand or weaken your brand. It's pretty crazy. Gal Borenstein was my guest today. He's got the new book Don't Believe the Hype, which is a great playbook for the digital trust in the AI Era. Gal, your stuff is fantastic. The book, the podcast, the blogs, you do some writing, a great follow and I'm just so glad you could join me. I'm thank you for your patience too and making this work. We were moving it around a little bit.

[A]

Thank you so much for having me. And again, if there's one kind of takeaway for your audience is that if you reach out through LinkedIn to me and send me a message, I'll be happy to provide a complimentary assessment of what are the troubles or problems that you need to to approach differently. Special offer to your listeners.

[B]

That is great, Gal. Thank you that I appreciate that.

[A]

Thank you very much for having me.