I spent years writing about beauty products, which is a strange training ground for strategy work, and also, I’ve come to think, the best one I could have had. The beauty industry runs on the gap between what a product claims and what it does — and if you spend long enough in that gap, you develop a very particular kind of scepticism. Not cynicism. Scepticism. The difference matters.
A good pitch and a good business are not the same thing, and the beauty aisle taught me to notice the difference faster than any business school could have. These days, when a founder shows me a deck full of confident language and no evidence, I hear the same thing I used to hear from a serum promising to “turn back time.” Lovely claim. Show me the skin.
