"99% of startups fail". Want to be among the 1% that succeed?

Then you need to master branding, and I’ll tell you how ↓

By aligning everything and everyone behind a strategy that puts your brand at the heart of your startup and ensure all decisions are guided by it.

When you do this, you can:

→ Manifest your differentiated position
→ Inspire and engage the right customers
→ Influence a higher perceived value (and gain pricing power)
→ Improve your bottom line exponentially
→ Enhance your team's focus and motivation
→ Strengthen creativity and innovation across the board

As a consultant, I have the freedom to question your assumptions, discover hidden truths, and identify overlooked challenges and opportunities.

Through a human-centered methodology and my 5-step framework called Epicenter✷, I get to the core of your business to understand, address, and reframe these insights, providing the direction needed to establish an indisputable position in your market.

I've successfully implemented the framework with dozens of startup teams worldwide who were able to raise millions in funding, make millions in revenue, and reach millions of people.

Here's what leaders like you said:

Dimo Yanchev, CEO & Co-founder, Almacena ↘
“We had a vague, confusing idea of our direction but now we understand our goals and actions for both the short and long term. Ezequiel’s a brilliant strategist and an amazing person.”

Juan Esteban Zuleta, CEO at Kin Analytics ↘
"Ezequiel goes beyond just knowing about branding. It was a breakthrough experience that led to transformative discussions that changed how we see our company and our brand's essence."

Guido Stefani, CEO & Co-founder, Extendeal ↘
“Ezequiel excels at interpreting situations to optimize them effectively. He guided us to think long-term and to question everything with intelligence.”

All of my work is rooted in my experience as a Disney executive for over 22 years, where I led award-winning teams in Latin America and Europe, and played a key role in shaping iconic brands like Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars for the digital age.

If you want to get serious about your brand and fixing your narrative, send me a DM!

See you soon!

Ezequiel Abramzon

Most people go to tech events to network.

I go to collect evidence…

Every time I go to a tech event, I run the same experiment.

A copy safari.

I picked up the habit at Disney.

We used to walk cities around the world scanning what brands were saying, showing, and selling, tracking how trends were evolving in real life.

Now I do the same thing at tech events.

I walk the entire expo floor scanning how brands communicate.

This week, I did a 34,188-step copy safari at MWC Barcelona:

✓ Badge checked
✓ Camera on
✓ Coffee in hand
✓ Off I go…

Booth 1: "The future of innovation…”

Booth 2: “Your future with AI…”

Booth 3: “Empowering your future…”

Booth 4: “Unlock a better future…”

Booth 5: I need a drink.

Aisle after aisle…
Booth after booth…
Millions spent…
Months of planning…
Endless approvals…
All to say the same thing… every year.

I’m at one of the world's most innovative events, surrounded by some of the biggest tech brands and they all sound identical. 

Let that absurdity sink in for a second.

So, here’s my take:

The companies behind those photos aren't stupid.

Their leaders are just asleep.

They have the budgets.

They have the teams.

They have the agencies.

What they don't have is the courage to say something different.

That’s a massive opportunity for startups.

Before your next web update, pitch deck, or event booth, ask this:

“Could a competitor say this exact same line?”

If yes, it’s probably your category talking, not you.

You're a startup founder.

Innovation is literally your job.

So innovate with your branding too.

Unless…

You’re asleep. 

Are you?

Ezequiel Abramzon ✷

I help growth-stage startups fix their brand narrative so they stop sounding generic and become the obvious choice for customers and investors | 22 years at Disney... So yeah, I’ve seen a thing or two about brands

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I used to enter planes on the main door and turn left.

Now I enter last and am happier than ever before.

Many things changed since I left the executive life at Disney.

Did I say “many”? Actually, almost everything changed!

At Disney, I was part of the machine.

And I mean that in the best possible way.

Flight booked, car waiting, confirmed agenda, presentation ready.

A full team making sure I could focus on what only I could do.

Like a pilot who walks onto the plane and finds everything ready: fuel checked, crew briefed, you just take the controls, make the calls that only you can make, and land it.

It was a privilege I didn't fully appreciate until it was gone.

Because the day I went solo, the machine disappeared.

Suddenly, I was the pilot, the copilot, the flight attendant, and the guy loading the luggage at 5 am… Every email, every proposal, every invoice, every post, every scheduling change, every follow-up. 

Me, all the way.

It was a brutal, necessary, clarifying switch.

But here's the irony…

When I work with growth-stage founders, I face the exact opposite challenge.

They built everything with their own hands: the pitch, the website copy, the LinkedIn posts, the sales scripts… They were in every meeting, on every call.

And it worked… until it didn’t.

Because now the company is growing, the team is bigger, but the founders still can't let go.

I've seen marketing teams lose weeks of work because a founder decided to rewrite a presentation the night before the pitch. 

I've seen campaigns delayed because the copy "didn't sound right" to someone who hadn't talked to a customer in months.

I know exactly why this happens, and it’s not because of ego.

It's fear.

Fear that without their hands on it, something will break.

That’s why a strategy is the ultimate asset for a growing startup.

It gives the team a shared language, a clear direction, and the confidence to execute without waiting for permission.

When everyone is aligned… 

You don't need to approve every message. 
You don't need to rewrite every slide. 
You don't need to be in every room.

The strategy does the work you used to do alone.

My switch was from having everything done for me to doing everything myself.

Yours is from doing everything yourself to trusting that the right system makes everyone better than you ever were alone.

That's what having a strategy gives you.

It prepares the plane, briefs the crew, and shows the flight plan.

So you can finally do what you're actually here to do:

Fly the thing.

Rio de Janeiro, here we go!

Next week, I’ll be keynote speaking at Kamay Code Rio.

Heavy 🥺 

The last time I was on a stage in Brazil, I was a Disney executive showing how we were innovating in brand storytelling across dozens of industries.

That was 7 years ago.

On Wednesday the 18th, I'm back but without the magic badge.

And I'm bringing a brand new talk: 

"The singularity advantage: Become a brand impossible to ignore."

There’s only 1 slide about AI, and you’re not going to like it.

If you are in town or planning to go:

→ Museu do Amanhã, Rio de Janeiro
→ March 18th
→ Get your ticket at www.kamaycode.com

Grateful to Kamay Ventures and the team for having me back.

See you there!

Apple just entered the mascot game!

Meet: Lil’ Finder Guy.

Apple dropped a series of TikTok videos introducing this adorable character as part of their MacBook Neo launch.

They are stepping into a special territory: Gen Z.

What a better way to do it with a little cute character.

Is it here to stay?

I hope so! 🩵 

I'm sure of one thing: 

We are about to see a LOT of new mascots around.

🤷‍♂️

Apparently, I've unlocked a new ICP: "Mums" 🤪 

"We automated everything" Yeah, including the lying. Great job!

What if books came with an AI agent trained on the author’s voice, so readers could ask questions, challenge ideas, and go deeper in real time, while reading?

Audible make it happen!

Yes, I know. My posture is a disaster.

But that’s not the kind of uncomfortable I want to talk about.

Let me ask you something:

Do decisions at your startup take longer than they should?
Do marketing and sales often say different things?
Do people leave meetings with different interpretations?
Does your pitch, website, and content feel disconnected?

If you answered yes to any of these…

That’s misalignment.

Nobody puts it on the P&L, but it's the most expensive item on it.

Most teams I talk to and work with have been living with this for months, sometimes years.

They just never called it what it is.

It shows up as wasted money, slow sales cycles, weak marketing, and staff eventually quitting.

Last week, I experienced a perfect example of it.

I asked a leadership team one important question, and two founders gave me opposite answers.

Not kind of different.

Opposite.

And both of them thought they were aligned.

Boom 💥  the room exploded.

Everyone started talking louder, and the conversation got ugly.

What I tend to do in these situations is go Depeche Mode:

Enjoy the silence.

I let the tension do its work, resisted the urge to fix it… until it was too much, and I took the room back with a new question:

“If both of you are right, which company are we actually running?”

Silence.

Suddenly, they saw it:

They were operating under different realities.

And if a leadership team can't align on what they're building, what do you think their customers are hearing?

The tricky part of misalignment is that it looks like normal meetings, normal decisions, normal work, until one day you realize everyone has been building a different version of the same company.

The moment a team can see that clearly, in the same room, at the same time, everything changes.

That uncomfortable question nobody asked (and I did) became the most valuable conversation the business had in months.

That's the paradox.

The uncomfortable conversation is not the problem.

Avoiding it is.

99% of brands would have put their logo on this coaster.

Texas Longhorn didn’t.

Sitting at their restaurant in Stockholm, I looked down and saw it.

I smiled like a kid who just got away with something.

And then I thought:

Someone at that company made a decision.

A small, completely optional, and easy to avoid decision.

Nobody was going to notice if the coaster just had the logo.

Nobody was going to complain.

The brief probably said “print coaster," and someone said, wait, what if we actually said something here?

That's it.

That's what I mean by having a brand mindset.

It's being conscious about crafting memories, meaning triggers, emotions, at every level, on every decision.

Intentional singularity.

What if this was one of your web popups on your SaaS?

Or a screen in the onboarding tutorial of your app?
Or the error message when something isn’t working?
Or the loading screen?
Or the subject of your automated welcome email?
Or the placeholder text in your empty search bar?
Or the confirmation screen after they sign up?

Most startups are so busy working that they overthink big brand moves and never make the small ones count.

Remember the kid in “The Matrix”?

Well…

The coaster is never just a coaster.

I f*cking love the other 1%.

Most companies that claim to be revolutionary aren’t.

So why do they keep claiming it?

I've been collecting bad branding for years in a file called "The Redundancy Report," and revolutions have their own chapter.

I started it as a joke for a client, then it became research.

Now it should belong to a museum 😅 

When a tech company claims to be revolutionary, but looks, sounds, and feels like every other one in our feeds, it creates the opposite of what they intended:

Doubt, disinterest, or worse… indifference.

You don't think "Wow, finally something new.”

You think "I've seen this before.”

Maybe it works with investors, but they’ve been drowning in revolutionary pitches since 2015.

Maybe it works with early adopters, but they'll try it, tell someone, and then move on to the next shiny thing because that's literally what they do.

We know that since 1962, thanks to Everett Rogers and his curve.

Early adopters are the spark, not the engine for growth.

You don’t need to sound like history in the making.

People want solutions that work now.

Not in two years.

Now.

Which begs the question: 

Why are you still selling the long term?

Show the value you can bring today.

That's what gets people to buy, stay, and trust you.

People want the safety of solid ground.

Stop selling the earthquake.

Matt Lerner

Startup growth strategist, Ex PayPal, 500 Startups VC, Founder @ SYSTM

I founded SYSTM to help startups find their big growth levers - the small actions that can have the biggest impact on their growth. We’ve worked with over 200 companies and earned a 96% founder “likely to recommend” score.

Before founding SYSTM, I was the London-based Partner of 500 Startups, an early-stage VC fund, where I built and ran an accelerator seed-stage growth program for our portfolio companies.

Prior to joining 500 Startups, I worked for many years building and managing growth teams for three  startups (two disasters, one exit), and later at PayPal. 

I approach my work first as a general manager and then as a marketer, product manager or both, as needed. My lens is quantitative, but rooted in deep customer insights and testing, and based on fast iteration. I’m always learning, and I really enjoy teaching and helping those around me to learn and improve. Skip to the references below, you'll see that I'm regarded as a thought leader in many areas of business, and an inspiring people manager who reliably delivers ahead of expectations.

Founder & CEO

At SYSTM (formerly Startup Core Strengths), our mission is to help early-stage startups find their big growth levers (and pull them). We've noticed that great startups don't waste time on small stuff, so we  focus everyone on the most impactful work.

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