Founder-led marketing means the founder's own voice, in posts, videos, essays and talks, is a primary way the company gets attention and trust. Well-known examples include Assaf Rappaport at Wiz, Dan Martell, Jason Lemkin with SaaStr, Rand Fishkin at Moz and SparkToro, and Adam Robinson at RB2B. What's copyable is the habit underneath: a founder who talks publicly and regularly about the real work, with the marketing team helping that voice travel.
Founder-led marketing is when the founder's own voice does a big share of the company's marketing. The founder writes the posts, records the videos, tells the story of the company in public, and the market learns to trust the company through that person.
The best examples are easy to name: Wiz's CEO Assaf Rappaport, Dan Martell, Jason Lemkin at SaaStr, Rand Fishkin at Moz and later SparkToro, and Adam Robinson at RB2B. They sell very different things. What they share is a founder who kept talking in public, about the actual work, for years.
I care about this because I've watched it from the inside. I spent eight years at Optibus, an Israeli transit-software scale-up, and I've gone on to build my own company on the same idea. Here's what I think each example shows, and what a B2B founder can realistically copy.
What founder-led marketing actually is
The simplest version: people buy from people they already feel they know. A founder who posts every week about the problems their customers have becomes a known quantity before the first sales call.
There's also a plain distribution reason. In my experience, a founder's personal profile gets roughly 5x the reach of the company page on LinkedIn. That makes the founder's feed the most valuable piece of real estate a company owns on the platform. Most companies spend it by reposting the company page's posts, which is the most common and most expensive mistake I see. (More on how the two differ in the LinkedIn company page glossary entry.)
A founder I was walking through strategy asked me the obvious question: can't the personal profile just amplify what the company page already posts? It can, and it's a waste. When you repost the company page, you put a post the algorithm already throttled into your strongest distribution slot. A weak post in a strong slot. The company page should be run well by marketing. The founder profile is a different instrument, and most in-house marketers won't operate it well, because it isn't theirs to operate.
So founder-led marketing has two parts: a founder with things to say, and a company that treats that founder's voice as a channel worth investing in.
Here are the five examples I'll walk through, at a glance:
| Founder | Company | Main channel | What's copyable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assaf Rappaport | Wiz | Public narrative, memos, press, LinkedIn | Tell the company's big moments in your own words |
| Dan Martell | SaaS Academy | YouTube, books, social | The founder makes the content, the team amplifies it |
| Jason Lemkin | SaaStr | Blog, Q&A, then events | Answer your market's questions in public, repeatedly |
| Rand Fishkin | Moz, SparkToro | Weekly video, blog, social | A recurring format you personally own |
| Adam Robinson | RB2B | LinkedIn posts | Build in public on the platform your buyers use |
Wiz: the growth engine nobody is analyzing
Google agreed to buy Wiz for $32B. Everyone analyzed the product: the cloud security platform, the speed of the revenue ramp, the go-to-market.
Almost nobody talked about the other engine: Assaf Rappaport's voice.
The clearest public example came in 2024, when Wiz walked away from an earlier, reportedly $23B offer from Google. The story the market heard came from Rappaport's own memo to employees, which was widely reported. The founder framed the moment in his own words. That's founder-led marketing at the highest stakes there are.
In my own research on cybersecurity marketing leaders, the Wiz deal was one of the few stories nearly all of them engaged with, so a founder's story became something an entire buyer category talked about.
What's copyable: you won't have a $32B moment. You will have a funding round, a big customer, a hard pivot, a bad quarter. Tell those moments yourself, early, in your own voice. If you don't, a press release will tell them for you, and nobody reads press releases.
Dan Martell: the marketing team enables, the founder creates
Dan Martell has said publicly that he attributes around $24M in revenue to content. Whatever the exact accounting, the shape of it is the lesson: the content that drove that revenue was his. His face, his stories, his opinions, on video and in writing, including his book Buy Back Your Time.
That's the model I find most useful for B2B founders, because it answers the question every founder asks me: "Can't my marketing team just do this?"
There's a budget problem hiding inside that question. In the startups I talk to, the founder's personal posts clearly outperform the company page, the data is sitting right there, and the CMO still doesn't invest in the founder's profile. I don't read that as bad faith. CMOs are buried in agency pitches and trained to chase volume metrics like whitepaper downloads and page impressions, so one person's profile doesn't register as marketing. The channel that works best belongs to the founder, and the content budget belongs to someone else. In my experience, founder-led marketing gets going when the founder decides the asset is theirs and invests in it directly.
They can do a lot. They can clip, edit, schedule, repurpose and distribute. What they can't do is have your opinions for you. When a marketing team writes the founder's content from scratch, it comes out sounding corporate, because it is. The team's job in founder-led marketing is to make the founder's voice travel further, and to make it cheap for the founder to produce it.
What's copyable: split the work that way. You supply the raw thinking (a voice memo after a customer call, a strong opinion from a board meeting, a mistake you made). Someone, or something, turns it into posts. You approve every one.
Jason Lemkin and Rand Fishkin: own a recurring format
These two are older examples, and I include them because they show founder-led marketing isn't a LinkedIn trend.
Jason Lemkin, after co-founding EchoSign, started SaaStr as a blog answering questions about building SaaS companies. He kept answering them, in public, for years. The blog became a community and then a large conference business. The content was the company before there was a company.
Rand Fishkin built a huge share of Moz's early audience through Whiteboard Friday, a weekly video where he explained SEO on a whiteboard. Later, at SparkToro, he kept doing the same thing: writing and speaking in his own voice about how audiences and marketing actually work.
What's copyable: a recurring format you personally own. One weekly post about the thing you know better than anyone, in a shape people come to expect. Consistency compounds in a way single viral posts don't.
Adam Robinson: build in public where your buyers already are
Adam Robinson is a founder example people in B2B SaaS bring up a lot. He has been very open about building RB2B's growth on his own LinkedIn posting, sharing numbers, decisions and opinions about the product and the market.
This one is closest to what most readers of this post could do next week. It doesn't need a conference, a book or a YouTube studio. It needs a founder who shows up on the platform where their buyers already spend time, and says specific things about the work. I wrote up my own low-effort version of this in building in public in 2 hours a week.
What's copyable: posting about the real work, with real numbers, on the platform your buyers use. Specific beats polished.
What's copyable, and what isn't
Some of what these founders have can't be copied. You can't borrow a $32B exit, a decade of SEO authority or a bestselling book. Don't try to imitate the surface.
Here's the part that transfers to any B2B founder:
- A point of view from your own work. Every one of these founders talks about things they personally did. That's why it lands. I go deeper on this in how founders actually build thought leadership.
- Consistency over a long time. Each of these is years of showing up.
- The founder's own voice. Their teams help, but the opinions are theirs and you can hear it.
- Big moments told first-hand. Raises, exits, pivots and failures, narrated by the founder.
- A team that amplifies the founder. Marketing's job is distribution. The voice stays the founder's.
Why most founder brands in B2B never start
In my experience, the blockers are time and a vague sense that posting is somehow beneath serious work.
I think that's backwards. The best leaders in the AI age are hands-on. You can't lead what you've never touched, and that includes your company's story. A founder who can't explain in public why the company exists is leaving the explanation to competitors.
The time problem is real, though, and it's also the most solvable one now. Most of the work in founder-led content is turning thoughts you already had into posts. That part AI does well, if it's fed your real thinking and you stay the approval gate. It's the reason I built Liftli. If you want a place to start before you touch any tool, the LinkedIn personal branding post covers why this is equity you keep even if the company changes.
Start small. One post a week, about something that happened in your business that week. Do it for three months. That's how every founder on this list started.