Hey y’all — you’re leaving trust on the table.

After a year or two of not consistently making content myself on social media, I’m starting again.

But I realized what I did before to build a 100k+ audience wasn’t going to work now.

As Andrew Yeung, Greg Isenberg, and Alex Lieberman show with their shifting focus towards video, it is now an essential piece of a founder’s content strategy.

It helps you stand out, build stronger relationships, and ultimately makes it easier to close investors, partners, candidates, leads, and everything else.

So I caught up with Tatem Lindner, who’s done over 5 billion views for founders and brands across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube and we realized most founders don’t know where to start with video.

Today we’re launching JOLT! as the first shortform video agency specifically for building founders’ personal brands.

We handle everything from trendspotting to scripting to account management.

Grab our free playbook here or read on to hear why now is the time to go all-in on video as a founder.

When we raised our $10M Series A from a16z, it was actually a surprise.

We hadn’t gone through some multi-round pitching process, or even put together a deck.

But they felt confident backing us because they already had a sense of who we are.

In the year leading up to the round, my co-founders and I had consistently and publicly shared our thoughts on the market, and shown behind the scenes of building the business.

This considerably de-risked the idea of investing in us. Our content was our version of a public resume for how we were approaching being founders.

The same phenomenon happened when we hired our Head of Growth. We beat out a startup who literally got Steph Curry (one of their investors) to make him a personal recruiting pitch video.

And it happened again when major companies like Coinbase, Solana, and more quickly partnered with us on revenue-generating deals.

That was 2022. We were early to the game. But now, in 2026, it’s no longer something anyone will call a distraction and has, instead, become a key part of company-building (regardless of your niche).

I’m not telling you to become a creator. I’m just telling you that every investor or potential user, partner, or senior engineer who’s been following you for a few months will be easier to get on board if you invest in a personal brand.

As a founder, you want to be impossible to forget.

The biggest founder-creators from X and LinkedIn like Greg Isenberg (34k TikTok followers, 130K IG, 667k YouTube), Alex Lieberman (119k TikTok, 151k IG, 12k YouTube), and Andrew Yeung (73k TikTok, 46k Instagram) have all moved heavily into video over the last year or two.

They saw how quickly people like Roy Lee from Cluely built a massive brand with video and realized that not focusing on video themselves would mean they’re just text on a screen.

Text-only content means you’re easier to forget, sandwiched between one founder’s funding announcement and another’s launch video.

Anyone can write "we move fast" or "I care about customers." Video is the only medium where you can build real trust with your audience before you ever speak to them.

Your personality, energy, and personal convictions come through in a stronger way.

You want your audience to know you're a person that they feel like they know. That's a categorically different relationship.

And chances are there are only a few people doing this type of content well on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube today.

That sounds crazy in 2026, but it’s surprisingly true.

Most founder content is on X (due to the network effects and gravity of investors being on the platform) and LinkedIn (due to the same, for sales and hiring).

But those same people are increasingly spending time on video-first platforms too. So you can be early enough to own your own category there.

And TikTok and Reels both have considerably strong algorithms for showing your content to people who don’t already know about or follow you but are in your exact target audience.

I built my audience (56k on X and 45k on LinkedIn) with text-first.

But after stepping back from social for the last year or two, as I thought about diving back into regular content on social again this year I realized just doing what I used to do wouldn’t work anymore.

Video is now an essential part to a fast-growing brand.

But I didn’t know where to start. So I caught up with Tatem Lindner. She’s built her own TikTok to 70k followers and has also generated over 5 billion views creating content for other founders and brands.

For example, she generated $1M in sales and 400k engagements in 90 days from scratch for Hulk Hogan, which led to a nine-figure funding round for his beer brand.

And we realized there was an opportunity here, so we built JOLT! to be the only shortform video agency specifically helping founders build their personal brands.

Over the last few months, we’ve worked with a few select founders (you can see more example videos on our site) where we’ve honed our processes and gotten ready to launch today.

(And, yes, you’ll be seeing me start posting daily shortform videos this month too. It’s simply too high leverage to not be doing).

We handle everything: trendspotting, ideation, scripting, editing, captions, posting, and account management.

All you need to do is film for ~30min/week. But, don’t worry, we provide example videos as templates for you to mimic.

And don’t worry if you’re camera shy or particularly time-poor. Our team can create a hyper-realistic digital twin of you that we can use if you prefer.

Really though, what we do is make content that actually sounds like you because not only do we know content, we know founder content.

We know the importance of how you come off to all the relevant stakeholders. We know the aggressive growth targets you have.

And we’d love to deliver some for you.

To celebrate launching, we’re offering our playbook (literally our secret sauce for making high-performing shortform video) for free. Grab it here.

Or grab some time with us here and see how we help you be impossible to forget.

Advertise in my newsletter to get in front of 65,000+ founders.

Founders: treat yourself for once.

A few of our partners are offering $$$ for taking a quick call with them (that’s it).

Honestly, block off a couple hours, knock them all out, and walk away with some cash to get off the ramen diet for the weekend.