Building a strong personal brand as a startup founder is not just important, it’s arguably crucial for the success of any given venture - particularly when it comes to raising finance from investors.
Why is personal branding so important? 92% of people trust people more than companies, and the abilities of a founding team is the most important factor driving investment decisions. It is about establishing yourself, and in turn, your startup as thought leaders in the industry.
In this article, we dive into two of the strongest founder brands in leisure marine.
Sampriti Bhattacharyya, Founder of Navier
Based in San Francisco, Sampriti has been exceptional at building a buzz around Navier since the very beginning and was able to secure an early-stage investment of +$7 million from Global Founders Capital, Treble, Next View Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, Soma Capital, Precursor Ventures, as well as angel investors like Charlie Songhurst, Josh Lee, Yida Gao, Kent Ho and David Jen.
Navier is regularly featured in major tech publications, including TechCrunch, as well as business publications, such as Robb Report and Forbes. Sampriti has also been featured in more regional San Francisco based publications, and leans into her Indian-origins with features in The Times of India (amongst others).
Sampriti often talks about the academic challenges, cultural barriers and financial hardships that she had to overcome to pursue her passion for engineering and ultimately launch Navier. She grew up in Kolkata, India, where she is said to have been an average student who failed physics and was told by her teacher to become a housewife. After finishing an internship with NASA, she moved to the US permanently in 2010 with only $200 to her name.
Sampriti’s personal brand is built around being tenacious and stopping at nothing to pursue a dream. She proves that with persistence, determination, and creativity, anything is possible, and we LOVE IT. Video-led content has also played a pivotal role in communication around Sampriti’s story, and you can watch an interview with Sampriti here.
Jelte Liebrand, Founder of savvy navvy
The founder of savvy navvy, Jelte Liebrand had the epiphany for building savvy navvy on a Clipper Round the World Yacht Race in 2014, “When I was down in the nav-station mid-Pacific, I was trying to figure out the best course down to Panama for the race. Should we stay in-shore, off-shore, choices about currents, weather and trying to compute what options are best. While heeled over at a 30-degree angle, holding on, I was desperately trying to look at the chartplotter, complex maps, and use a mouse on a laptop. I thought to myself that there must be an easier way to do this. So that’s really where the idea started.”
He then went on to spend two years researching and building the foundation for savvy navvy and in July 2017, he left his job at Google in San Fransisco to get his vision of easy, safe navigation out to every sailor on the water. Since then, savvy navvy has gone on to raise +£5M in funding across various rounds and the team have leveraged crowdfunding to build a strong following of investors and customers.
We love the story of an ex-Google software engineer and avid sailor leaving corporate life to build a solution which now enables hundreds of thousands of users across the globe to find a safer and easier way to navigate at sea. The startup also recently appointed another ex-Google employee as Chief Marketing Officer, further adding credibility to the capabilities of the team.
savvy navvy is regularly featured in marine specific publications and has won the British Marine growth award two years running. Jelte himself has also been recognised as one of the most exceptional business leaders in the UK, having won ‘Scale-Up Entrepreneur of the Year’ at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards in 2022.
Building your own founder brand
Building a buzz and providing a growth platform to help startups succeed is what we do best here at Yachting Ventures. Interested in learning more about how we can support you to build a strong founder brand?
Contact us: hello@yachtingventures.co
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