Advertising agency to private equity: Building a brand on the same team

In this episode of The Brand Hunch podcast, we chat to Brian Wakabayashi at CoLab. Brian spent many years leading global strategy for big brands like Xbox on agency side, and took the jump over to CoLab, a creative studio owned by WestCap, a private equity investor based in San Francisco. CoLab was born out of a bunch of the original Airbnb team, and brings a strong product and marketing focus to the investments. We discuss how different the process is when there's no external agency pitching involved in brand building, how and when technology start ups should invest in brand, what he would do with a $0 marketing budget, and why brand consistency is key.