Very few can compete with Lady Gaga in brand awareness. Yet Helena and Woody Hambrecht are doing so with Haus, the aperitif brand with the same name as Gaga’s direct-to-consumer beauty brand Haus Labs. Backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Gaga’s brand launched the same year as the Hambrecht’s aperitif. Today, the bottle outranks the beauty in search engine optimization and awareness. Haus possesses an energy that few understand. By mastering authenticity and storytelling, it became thetop ranked Haus despite going up against a celebrity brand.
In the two years that I sat at that Austin coffee house each day, it felt like I found an arbitrage opportunity: a free education. But the credit was none my own. The room over-indexed on successful executives and entrepreneurs who’d seen material success in the booming Texas city. I listened intently. The majority of the ideas came from business partners, waiters, investors, entrepreneurs, clergy, artists, and bystanders who were enthusiastic about their pursuits. Their conversations filled gaps in my thinking. It was a period of information synthesis: a process of integrating information from disparate sources into a coherent whole.
