I’m a results-driven marketing executive with 20+ years of global experience leading B2C and B2B brand transformation, growth acceleration, and digital innovation. I help startups scale and global giants thrive; blending creative storytelling with data, AI, and performance marketing.

From iconic powerhouses like L’Oréal, Ralph Lauren Fragrances, Danone, Evian, and Nestlé to disruptive innovators like Else Nutrition, SodaStream, and SavorEat, I’ve led high-impact initiatives that deliver measurable results in revenue, market share, and customer engagement.

Core Strengths:

✅ Go-to-Market & Growth Strategy – Launched and scaled multi-million dollar products across North America, Europe, and APAC. Skilled at crafting agile GTM strategies for both high-growth startups and enterprise brands.
✅ Brand Positioning & Creative Campaigns – Deep expertise in brand identity, repositioning, and multi-award-winning storytelling that connects with modern consumers.
✅ AI-Powered & Performance Marketing – Mastery of digital strategy, AI for marketing, paid media, SEO/SEM, influencer marketing, omnichannel campaigns, and MarTech automation.
✅ E-commerce & DTC Growth – Proven track record scaling Amazon, Shopify, and DTC ecosystems using conversion-optimized tactics and data-driven insights.
✅ Marketing Strategy Consulting & Fractional CMO Leadership – Partner to founders and C-suites driving brand evolution, cross-functional alignment, and full-funnel growth.

Born in Canada, fluent in English and Hebrew, and globally oriented - I bring a unique mix of big-brand discipline and startup hustle. Whether it’s building a household name or launching a category-defining product, I deliver with precision, passion, and purpose.

Certified in:

🎓 Kellogg Northwestern – Digital Marketing Strategies: AI, Automation & Data; University of Toronto - Digital marketing


Marketing Executive | CMO | VP Marketing | Growth Marketing | Fractional CMO | Consumer Marketing | Tech Marketing | Digital Strategy | Demand Generation | Brand Storytelling | Generative AI | Food-Tech | SaaS | FMCG | Health & Wellness | Product Launch | E-commerce Strategy | Amazon Growth | Performance Media | Omnichannel | Content Strategy | PR | Social Media | Market Research | Team Leadership

Barak Orenstein

I’ve founded several startups and am currently working on an AI-driven group purchasing e-commerce project, using optimization algorithms and data analysis. As an angel investor, I’ve backed several startups—some successful, some not. I’m also diving deep into fundraising and sharing my insights on my page. Great to connect!

Victor Sankin

Amazon is starting another round of layoffs on January 26, cutting up to 30,000 employees, after 14,000 cuts in 2025.

Even the best jobs are still a lease. And the lease can end without your consent.

When you choose to become a founder, you turn your life into an asset. Not a resume that gets reset every time you change companies.

A founder has three rare advantages.

First the right to make decisions. I

n a job, you execute someone else’s taste. A founder turns their own taste into the product, the hiring, the pricing, and the culture. You’re not waiting to be picked. You’re building your own game.

Second the speed of learning. 

In big companies, feedback is delayed and filtered. In a startup, reality hits fast: churn, cash running out, hiring that doesn’t work, competitors shipping. It hurts, but it’s honest. The market becomes your teacher.

Third trust. 

A strong founder brand isn’t marketing. It’s reducing doubt. People join your team faster, invest faster, and partner faster when you feel coherent and real. That’s why VCs say the team matters more than the idea. They’re betting on your ability to adapt when the plan breaks.

A startup isn’t one business. One product might fail, but the assets remain: distribution, relationships, data, a network of strong people, and a reputation for shipping.

The founder’s job is simple.

 Reduce uncertainty every week.

In the pitch show adoption and growth, not dreams. 

In the company pick a North Star metric. 

In yourself train calm, because volatility is the default setting.

Yes, the hours are real. The stress is real.

But the upside is real too. It’s the upside most employees almost never get to touch.

Angel Investor | Help founders find their perfect investors | CEO and Founder of @USE4COINS and @Abbigli

Founder-Advantage-in-an-Unstable-Economy

I will say this as someone who has seen deals like this many times.
And I will say it in defense of investors.

If you invested in startups, put real money in, and still have not received a single cent back, that is not stupidity.
It is a normal experience.

Most investors lose money not because founders openly lie, but because deception looks reasonable and professional.

The founder speaks calmly and confidently.
He does not pressure you or rush you.
He does not promise instant millions or miracles.

Everything seems properly put together.
You do not feel the risk.
You only feel like there is a well thought out plan.

Someone reputable invested before you.
A fund with a name.
An angel with a reputation.

And that lowers your guard more than any numbers ever could.
That is where the risk appears.

So called dangerous startups look convincing and well organized.
For every question, they have a persuasive answer.
For every weak metric, a nice interpretation.
For every risk, a promise that they will close it.

But as an investor, you have to see the signals.

If you cannot see the product working live, it most likely does not exist.
If every conversation goes only through the founder, the information is being filtered and you are not being introduced to the team.
If they keep explaining the numbers but never showing them, that is defense, not transparency.

If after the conversation you feel calm and safe instead of clear, you should stop and not invest.

Safety in venture is one of the most expensive illusions.

Next time, watch the conversation itself.
When everything sounds too smooth, reasonable, and comfortable, that is very often where the lost money is.

Sometimes marketing works not because it’s “right,” but because it happened to be close to an anomaly at the right moment.

The story is simple.

Donald Trump posts something that gets massive attention.
In the frame: Nicolás Maduro wearing a Nike tracksuit.
Nothing special about it. Not a new drop. Just a long-tail item with no real hype.

Within a day, that exact model gets cleared out.

There’s no meaningful connection between Trump and Nike.
No campaign.
No plan.
Just attention created by the collision of context and scale.

For founders and marketers, that’s an uncomfortable but useful lesson.

Once traffic gets big enough, you lose the ability to think about “the audience” as something coherent and controllable through personas and neat motivations, not because you’re being lazy, but because that logic stops fitting the reality of scale.

At that level, the audience isn’t a segment.
It’s a stream of reactions, where different triggers briefly converge into a single moment of attention.

And that changes how you think.

Relevance to the product becomes secondary, and a more practical question takes over: what caused the spike, and can you capture it, amplify it, or at least avoid missing it.

That’s how big creators operate.
That’s how platforms behave.
And that’s how the attention market works, whether we like it or not.

At scale, the winner isn’t the one who explains everything perfectly.
It’s the one who notices the anomaly and moves while the attention is still there.

Marketing-Lessons-from-Attention-Anomalies

Not everything that shines is AI.

People aren’t tired of AI as a tool.
They’re tired of the feeling that what they see isn’t real.

When something looks too perfect, it stops being convincing.
It starts raising questions.

You can see this shift clearly in beauty. Merit Beauty has been moving away from visuals that used to “sell.”
Instead of spotless setups, they post messy sink shots, scuffed cases, used-up tubes, and real signs of everyday use.

It’s a simple message: real people use this product, not an algorithm.

From a capital perspective, the logic is straightforward.
AI has made polished advertising cheap, which means it’s no longer a reliable signal of quality.
When perfection becomes available to everyone, it stops separating strong brands from weak ones.

So the focus shifts
from aesthetics to proof.

According to The Business of Fashion, 81% of marketing leaders in 2025 believe consumers are willing to pay more for human-made content, not AI-generated work.

For investors, that’s a capital signal: value is moving toward what can’t be generated, the trace of a real human.

In a world where almost anything can be faked, the advantage isn’t perfection.
It’s believability.

The market rarely punishes imperfection.
But it almost always punishes the feeling of manipulation.

If you look closely at the fastest-growing professions in 2026, they share a simple common thread.
They’re all about the same thing: turning complexity into clear, tangible results.

The first group includes people who make AI genuinely useful.
Not just engineers.
These are professionals who turn models into real working processes.
AI engineers, AI strategists, data annotation specialists.
Different levels, one expectation: technology should work in practice, not just look good in presentations.

The second group consists of professions close to money.
Sales, advertising sales, medical billing.
They’re growing not because they’re fashionable, but because they directly affect revenue and losses.

The third group is independent professionals.
Founders, consultants, advisors, venture partners.
People for whom control over decisions, pace, and income truly matters.

Value today is created by reducing uncertainty and turning complexity into something that actually works.
Those who operate between complexity and practice remain in demand.

I noticed something odd.

Startups rarely die because the idea was bad.
More often, they die because of the founder’s mindset.

And it’s not beginners who make the mistake.
It’s smart, experienced, principled people.
The kind who are used to being right, instead of checking whether the market agrees.

Here’s the difference, in my view, between an entrepreneur and a “smart professional.”

First. Growth matters more than stability.
Big revenue without growth doesn’t prove much.
It can be momentum, a lucky moment, or a decision that worked in the past.
If you’re not growing for months, the problem usually isn’t the market.
It’s how the market sees your product and why it should care today.

Y Combinator says it simply:
not “Are we good?” but “Are we growing?”

Second. Audience comes before product.
Most businesses first build a steady way to reach their audience,
and only then decide what to sell to them.
Attention is an asset.
A product is how you turn that asset into results.

Airbnb didn’t start by polishing the platform.
They took photos themselves and went where demand already existed.
That wasn’t product work.
That was distribution.

Third. Growth usually stalls because of hidden constraints, not lack of effort.
Weak teams add hours and headcount.
Strong teams look for what’s blocking growth:
a fuzzy offer, the wrong segment, bad onboarding, the wrong metric.
Removing one bottleneck can beat months of grinding.

Fourth. Tests matter more than plans.
You can’t know in advance what will work.
So you run many quick experiments with clear feedback.
When something gets strong traction, everything else drops in priority.

An entrepreneur isn’t the person who thought it all through.
It’s the person who cuts what doesn’t matter
and doubles down on what clearly works.

Images sourced from public startup infographics shared on Pinterest.

Most-startups-dont-fail-from-bad-ideas

When a founder starts a company, they usually cannot value it honestly.

Early on, the company does not have the one thing a valuation needs: a price. No stable revenue. No growth history. No clear benchmarks to compare against.

Any valuation at that stage is a guess. Both the founder and the investor know that, but they look at the future differently.

The founder sees potential. The investor sees risk.

That is why arguing about valuation early is usually pointless. To the investor it looks too high. To the founder it feels too low and painful.

That is where a SAFE shows up.

A SAFE is a compromise between two sides that cannot agree on a price today. The idea is simple. Do not lock in a valuation now. Delay that conversation until there is a market and real metrics.

The founder gets money now. The investor gets the right to a stake later.

But it is important to understand what you are delaying.

A SAFE is not easy money.

When there is no price yet, a SAFE feels convenient. You take the money now and push the hard questions to later.

No shares. No percentages on the cap table (cap table means who owns what). No feeling that you gave anything away.

That is why a SAFE looks safe at seed. And that is why it becomes dangerous later.

When Series A starts or an acquisition conversation begins, many founders see the real picture for the first time.

Step 1. A post-money SAFE locks in ownership, not dollars

A founder thinks like this. 300k at a 3M cap is about 10 percent. Then one more SAFE, so maybe 20 percent total.

In practice it does not work like that. Each post-money SAFE locks in its own stake in advance. The cap is the maximum valuation used to calculate the investor's conversion into shares.

Those stakes do not dilute each other. They mainly dilute the founder and the team.

So at Series A, founders often discover that 25 to 35 percent of the company was already promised before a priced investor ever showed up.

It is not a mistake and it is not a trick. It is a direct result of how the instrument works.

Step 2. Pre-money vs post-money is about who pays for dilution

With a pre-money SAFE, dilution is shared across everyone, including earlier SAFE investors. With a post-money SAFE, dilution falls on common stock, because the investor's stake is already fixed.

The cap and the check can look the same. The outcome for the founder can be very different.

Because a SAFE does not show ownership. It does not show control. It does not show the losses.

But the economics do not disappear. They just wait for the moment when you can no longer ignore them.

A SAFE is not dangerous right away. It is dangerous when it is already too late to fix.

I’ve been thinking about Anastasia Fedko’s Golden Globes moment.

It’s a really telling pattern.

This case isn’t about going viral.
It’s about how the market starts believing in you before it even pays attention to your content.

Her team built a simple chain of credibility signals.

Here’s what happened:

a girl from a small town in Russia shows up inside awards season

her presence gets documented in Getty Images

the official Golden Globes account posts about her

and there are photos editors can use immediately, without back and forth


After that, perception shifts on its own.

The question "Who is she?" just disappears.

It gets replaced with:
"She must be in the industry."

I call this a Credibility Cascade.

When legitimacy comes first, reach follows.
And virality becomes a side effect.

Why it works:

People don’t do deep fact checking.
They read familiar patterns.

And the pattern is simple:
Getty + an official account + a major event = she’s one of us.

This isn’t only useful for influencers.
It matters for founders and operators too.

If you’re building a personal brand, a startup, or a business,
your job isn’t to make more content.

Your job is to remove doubt.

Content can amplify trust.
But trust usually starts in the context around you, not in the post itself.

How-Credibility-Forms-Before-Content

Release is step zero.
A real business starts when people come back, pay, and stick around.

Over the last few months, the App Store has seen a spike in releases. Building got so cheap because of vibe coding that year over year launches jumped a lot.

What does that mean in practice?

More releases do not mean more demand. In 2025 the App Store is hitting a peak in new launches, but revenue is not growing nearly as fast.

You can ship a product fast. Keeping it alive is the hard part.

Competition is tighter. Simple copies of your idea can show up in days, not months.
This is not an innovation boom. It is a fight for limited attention.

Reach and traffic are the real currency now. Shipping is just the entry ticket.
User acquisition is getting more expensive, and attention spans are getting shorter.

Monetization is not installs. Installs still matter, but the money is decided by something else:
retention, user lifetime, refunds, and subscription cancellations.

Technology lowered the barrier to entry. Competition raised the bar for winning.

When-Launches-Stop-Meaning-Growth

When 25-35 year olds who can afford new still start with resale (people re selling items to each other, often through marketplaces), that is no longer a niche thing. It is the new normal.

I see it as a clear signal for startups building products for millennials.

This audience buys differently.

New is not automatically valuable anymore.

Value is faster, cheaper, and without the feeling you just got nicely overcharged.

That is why resale wins. Not because it has more inventory.

It wins because it removes the extra layers. Repackaging, markups, and a brand story used instead of real utility.

If your startup sells to 25-35 year olds, check one thing that really matters.

Does your product have a life after the first transaction.

This generation thinks in resale, swaps, and getting some value back.

If that does not exist, your product feels like a dead end.

Resale is not competing with brands.

It is challenging the whole idea that new automatically deserves a premium.

And startups that get this will not just build DTC.

They will build infrastructure for a new kind of consumer behavior

Why-Resale-Became-the-New-Normal

There’s a billionaire who personally reads cold emails and sometimes invests because of them.

That’s Mark Cuban. But here’s the point: he doesn’t read emails. He decides whether to open them or not.

You don’t have an email. You have three seconds.

Subject line. Preview text. First line.

Everything else exists only if you pass that filter.

The most common rookie mistake is trying to be likable "Exciting opportunity.” “Hope you are doing well.” “Would love to introduce.”

For someone getting hundreds of emails a day, that’s not politeness. It’s noise.

He opens emails that are easy to understand fast and easy to find later.

So your message needs the company name, the stage, and one credibility anchor.

No hype. No long intro. No “can we hop on a call?”

If he can’t scan it in 20 seconds, he won’t read it. And if the first lines don’t contain verifiable facts—real numbers and specifics (revenue, growth, customers, launch, who’s already invested) there’s no trust.

Then comes the second mistake, even more expensive: a big ask.

A call. A calendar invite. “30 minutes to discuss.”

To an investor, that’s not an opportunity. That’s a risk of wasted time.

A reply matters more than a call. A reply is already an investment of attention.

The structure that works can feel almost blunt: say it’s a cold email, give one strong trust signal, explain what you do in plain English, show adoption with numbers, then ask one small yes/no question.

Not “let’s schedule a call,” but “does it make sense to send details?”

That’s how you get past the first filter.

And the last mistake the just following up follow up. Without new facts, it reads like “reminding you I exist.” With new facts, it’s a real update because reality changed.

A new customer. Growth. A launch. A new investor.

In the end, a cold email isn’t begging for attention. It’s a test of how you think.

If you can compress meaning and write in facts, there’s a chance it gets opened. Sometimes it gets a reply. And sometimes it gets an investment.

That’s how someone thinks when they get hundreds of emails a day.

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