If You Only Respect the Metrics, You Miss the Whole Point

In nearly every startup boardroom, there's a moment when the tone shifts.

It might be subtle - the way someone flips to a spreadsheet or a dashboard. Or how the questions go from open and curious to pointed and clinical. Suddenly, the air in the room thickens, the energy narrows, and the language gets cold:

Pipeline. CAC. ARR. ROI. Churn. Runway.

If you’re a founder, you know the moment I’m talking about.

And let me be quite clear - I’ve lived in that world. I’ve built the dashboards, managed the metrics, and presented them to investors, to the C-Suite, to the board. In fact, as the CEO, I led the board meetings. I raised over $13 million over three rounds of venture capital. I closed enterprise deals. And I scaled a SaaS company from zero to millions in ARR.

Numbers aren’t foreign to me.

But I didn’t build my company for the numbers. I built it for what they couldn’t measure.

And for years, that part (the brand, the story, the meaning, the purpose, the “why”) was often dismissed as “soft.” Until it started driving results that spreadsheets couldn’t predict or capture with pretty, clean attribution models.

When the Metrics Are the Only Things That Matter

Somewhere along the way, it was decided that performance metrics were the only credible markers of progress. That if it can’t be quantified, it can’t be valuable.

In a way, I do get it. Metrics give us clarity. They offer certainty in the chaos. They’re easy to stack and compare. But when metrics become the only currency in the room, something dangerous happens.

• We start defining value by volume.
• We reward pattern recognition over creativity.
• We prioritize investor approval over audience validation.

And we quietly discredit the founders who lead with vision, creativity, and humanity.

I’ve experienced this firsthand. The strategic, visionary conversation would shift into a numbers-only interrogation. Then I would feel this subtle, but very real devaluation of my perspective and my expertise.

Brand Was Always the Driver

Here's what those spreadsheets never showed:

• Our brand attracted enterprise deals before we had product parity.
• Our story attracted senior talent during the height of the Great Resignation.
• Our brand earned loyalty, secured funding, and grew through a global crises and market instability.

When people ask what made Casted stand out and grow so rapidly in its early days, we definitely didn't "out-metric" the competition. We experienced rapid success because of the deeply human brand experience we delivered from day one.

That doesn’t show up on a P&L.
But it shows up in inbound leads, renewals, referrals, retention, and reputation.

And now, the same people who once told me to stop prioritizing brand are posting about how “authentic storytelling is the future of B2B.”

Funny how that works.

Human Brands Have Always Outperformed

This isn’t a new idea. The best brands in B2B have always been human-led. They’ve just rarely gotten credit for it 

…because it's harder to attribute a deal to a feeling than to a funnel.

But if you’re building a brand that truly resonates, the metrics will follow. In fact, research from Edelman has shown that brands that lead with trust, purpose, and human connection not only drive preference, they also close faster and retain longer.

So why do so many founders still shrink to fit into someone else's spreadsheet?

Because we’re told that credibility lives in the numbers. And that the rest is soft, less-than, and irrelevant.

That’s a lie.

Metrics Matter. But They’re Not the Whole Story.

I’m not against metrics. Every founder - and actually every leader and aspiring leader - needs to understand the business model, know their burn, and make data-informed decisions.

But when metrics become the only measure of value, we lose the very thing that makes a brand matter.

We lose the why.
We lose the soul.
We lose the story that made the whole thing worth building in the first place.

And if that sounds “too emotional” for some investors, so freaking be it. The future of business is emotional. It is human. It is audacious.

We don’t need more perfectly optimized funnels.
We need more leaders building something people will remember.

Founders, Ask Yourself:

Are you optimizing for investor approval? Or are you building something that will outlive your pitch deck?

Because there is a difference.

One may get you a nice funding round.
The other gives you a lasting legacy.

I’ll never tell a founder to ignore the numbers. But I will always tell them to prioritize creativity and connection. Because human brands win. 

If This Resonates...

If you’re a founder who’s tired of being told to “tone it down,” to be less emotional, less creative, less you. …I see you.

You’re not the outlier. You’re the future.