Behind the Brand: Garrison Yang, VP of Marketing at Ava Labs

Welcome to our first edition of Behind The Brand, a weekly newsletter featuring leaders at startups and VCs to highlight their unique perspectives on design, brand, and marketing for founders, operators, and investors across the early stages.

At Slope , our goal is to build category defining creative for exceptional companies, and we believe brand is applicable to everyone in different ways depending on your role, stage, or industry.

We’re excited to kick this series off with Garrison Y. , VP of Growth & Strategy at Ava Labs. Ava Labs is a next generation blockchain platform currently developing the Avalanche platform and AVAX cryptocurrency. They have raised over $350M from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz & Hashkey Capital at a $5.25B valuation.

First off, what is your background and how did you land in your current role??

I took a bit of a funky path to get into marketing! I studied environmental engineering and GIS of all things and was dead set on working in sustainability. My first job was designing and developing renewable energy projects for Engie, where I fell in love with creating narratives, positioning products, and building stories around our brand.?

I made the jump to a company called Monotype, where I was fortunate to be exposed to global brands like Nike, Adidas, and LVMH. eCommerce (specifically Shopify) was absolutely taking off at this point, and I made the jump to Facebook, where I joined the Disruptors team, and learned everything there was to know about high growth digital disruptors like Airbnb, SoFi, Robinhood, Peloton, and others who were writing the playbook on how to build and grow disruptive brands.

From there I helped build unicorn healthtech company Incredible Health, and turned a personal passion project in Web3 gaming into the job I have today at Ava Labs as VP of Growth.

How does brand factor into the growth strategy at Ava?

In Web3, brand is everything. Web3 as an industry is still very much dependent on momentum. Our success and failure as a project, and as an industry, relies on how much people believe in the value of what we are building. Without that belief, that community, the growth of crypto would grind to a halt, and many of the projects we see today would no longer have access to resources to continue operating.

This means that our brand is incredibly important, and we have to ensure that we consider how all of our audiences perceive and engage with our brand, from our community members to our partners to our investors to regulators and to the broader world stage that is watching this industry find its footing.

Our ability to tell our brand story and position not just where our brand is today relative to competitors, but also where our brand is going to be, allows us to maintain momentum and have the support we need to continue to grow.

And growth here means a lot of different things - there is access to capital through investors, there is access to talent by maintaining the firm’s brand of being a top tier employer, and there is access to a community of developers and users, whose adoption and engagement with the ecosystem quite literally define growth for the network.

How do you bridge the gap between brand and the different product business units?

What many people don’t know is that Ava Labs is building a tech business, not just a blockchain. Like any large tech company that is developing many solutions for different industries, business, and developers, we also have a large ecosystem of business units and solutions.?

Tying all of these products and solutions together into a single brand ecosystem is definitely a challenging exercise, and something that we treat as an ongoing dialogue between marketing, product, and engineering.?

For me as a marketing leader, it means creating a brand foundation that is sound enough to build and expand products on top of, but also flexible enough to accommodate future products and solutions that we haven’t even begun to think about. It’s our job to create a strong brand today, so that we can support the business units and product lines of tomorrow.

As a marketer focused on growth, how do you measure the ROI of brand??

I think a lot of our peers incorrectly tunnel vision on trying to boil brand down into a single metric like a customer acquisition cost or a brand recall lift.

Conceptually, brand is mindshare. That mindshare can be broken down into components, namely awareness, affinity, and intent.

A well built brand has strong awareness, deep affinity, and positive intent.

A well built brand makes it easier for other efforts to drive the metrics we care about, like sourced leads, closed deals, acquired customers, and retained users. The ROI of brand shows up in how easy it is to move the needle in everything else that the firm does.

We certainly identify metrics to help us understand the relative efficiency of driving brand outcomes (e.g. was the cost of exposure for Event A better or worse than Event B), but I try to keep an open mind about how we go about investing in brand. Forecasted ROI contains an element of confidence, and we tend to over index on assigning higher confidence levels (naturally) to things we’ve seen or done before. Unfortunately, that also stifles creativity, and a huge element of building a brand is delivering value or showing up in a way that no one else has before.

Who or what inspires you the most?

Without a doubt, the community we build with and build for. I know every company says that they do it for the customers, but in the case of the Avalanche Network, there is literally no business, no network, if it weren’t for the users and the developers. Everything we do is to help them drive growth, to make it easier for them to build on and access the network, and to make sure that this community’s brand is something they feel proud to be a part of.