How to build a powerful founder brand (without a PR team)
How Mews CEO Matthijs Welle uses unpolished, unfiltered, and deeply human storytelling to drive massive employer brand and business results
👋 Hey, Dan here.
Every week, I talk to founders building ambitious companies from the Netherlands. I want to understand how they think and operate – and what’s different about building from the lowlands. 🇳🇱
This one’s about something simple, yet strangely rare:
A founder who says what he really thinks, in public, under his own name, without running it past his PR team first.
Read this if you want to learn:
Why founder brand now matters more than company brand
What being so open has brought Matthijs Welle and Mews
How Matt writes his LinkedIn posts – what his process looks like
Why LinkedIn is the best platform for founders
Why vulnerability is a strength – that more male CEOs should embrace
Matthijs Welle (who goes by Matt) is the CEO of Mews, an Amsterdam-based unicorn and one of Europe’s fastest-growing hotel tech companies.
I first met him a few years ago at the inaugural LET Awards while covering the event for Techleap. Matt won the award. He impressed me then, and he’s impressed me on LinkedIn ever since. He’s been posting his unfiltered thoughts there for 16 years – basically since LinkedIn launched.
A few weeks ago, he posted something that sparked a big, uncomfortable and mostly negative reaction. But he didn’t delete it (he’s never deleted a post). He left it up, added context in another post, and owned it.
That’s when I reached out. I wanted to understand his reasons for telling it exactly as he sees it, and the concrete benefits – and drawbacks – it brings him and Mews.
Because while plenty of founders are on LinkedIn these days, Matt argues that almost none of them are really there.
“They talk about themselves, but they don’t really talk about themselves. They aren’t vulnerable.”
They post about company milestones. They praise their teams. They share safe, positive lessons wrapped up in a neat little bow. But they rarely let you see the human behind the corporate avatar – the doubts, the mistakes, the thing that’s worrying them at 1am.
Matt is an exception. “People need to see the person behind the screen,” he told me.
He’s figured out something most leaders haven’t. And as a ghostwriter myself, hearing his perspective was refreshing. I wish more founders thought this way.
Let’s dive into his playbook on how, and why, he does it:
1. The post that kicked off this conversation
A few weeks ago, Matt posted this:
The post was about AI and expectations. That Mews is transforming into an AI-native company, the bar for everyone working there is rising, and if you’re resisting that change, this might not be the right place for you anymore.
It’s basically the same thing Hans Scheffer and Fabrizio Del Maffeo have told me: AI means transformation, and leaders who believe that have to say it out loud eventually.
But the way Matt phrased it landed badly. “It was quite brutalist,” he told me. He got messages from people who know him well saying the post felt cold. Insensitive. Not him.
“Friends reached out and said it didn’t sound like me – that I would have had more nuance.”
Matt gave me some context in our conversation, noting he wrote it at 1am on a plane. He’d just landed, exhausted, and instead of sleeping on it – he scheduled it to go out the next morning.
“I should have just woken up and re-read it.”
He considered deleting it. But he’s never deleted a post in his life. So instead he left it up – and wrote a follow-up post that added the context he’d left out the first time:
“I have to own what I put out into the world. If it’s misinterpreted, I should add context.”
But: he still believes the core message of his first post.
“Whilst I didn’t love the way I phrased it, the message is still the same. Jobs that were previously done manually can now be automated. Release cycles have improved dramatically. We’re updating every job description. Every new hire needs to provide evidence of their AI skills. This is not optional.”
What he got wrong wasn’t the content. It was the humanity. And the difference between those two things – between a message that’s true and a message that lands – is what the rest of this article is about.
2. Why Matt posts – and the strategy he never wrote down (til now)
Matt has been on LinkedIn ever since it launched – 16 years ago, when he was a sales manager at Hilton.
“I just got on it, and I thought – oh, this is a great platform to connect with people.”
Then he started Mews, but didn’t feel ready to post much right away.
“We had a really rough start. So in the early days, I was like – who am I to share and advise other people if my business isn’t thriving?”
It was only as Mews started to find its footing that something shifted.
“Once you start to see some success, you feel like you’ve earned legitimacy to actually be able to share your story and tell people what you think.”
But legitimacy was only part of it. The bigger reason is simpler: it’s just who he is.
“I don’t have much of a filter.” He thinks deeply before he posts anything – often for hours and days – but the voice that comes out is always his. Unpolished. Direct. And honest about what’s working and what isn’t.
“I just want to show up as myself.”
With his friends, he goes even further. “In my personal life, I definitely overshare. With my friends, I know I can say outrageous things just for the fun of it.”
On LinkedIn, he has to pull back slightly – which he’s learned the hard way at times – but the instinct is the same: say the real thing, not the safe thing.
And the reason he kept posting was to give back at scale.
“I often get asked if I can be a mentor, and I always say no – because it’s not scalable for me to do one-on-one. So instead I share my lessons publicly. If you have a great question, I’ll answer it publicly. It’s a more scalable way of giving back.”
There’s a strategy underneath it that Matt admits he’s never written down – but knows it’s there.
“It’s employer branding. People don’t know Mews – we’re a B2B hotel tech company – but I want them to think of us as an employer they want to work at, because they’ve seen my narratives online, and can see that our culture is real.”
It’s also become how he communicates with his team between all-hands. How he reaches customers – existing and new. And how he’s connected with investors. “Some of our early investors – I was able to reach them because of my LinkedIn content and network. There are so many angles to what I’m doing.”
Matt’s LinkedIn Strategy
Post 3-4 times weekly
Obsess about what drives engagement and from which audiences.
For example a employer brand post about remote work, should have high engagement from a more universal audience, versus a niche post trying to reach hoteliers.
Understand who your audience is, and then judge yourself on whether you reached them (people from what industries engaged with your post)
Topics should be a mix of: customer advocacy, product releases, employer brand (what makes us a good employer) and personal founder stories (fails, growth, wins)
Posts should also have a variety of formats:
Text only (these get surprisingly high engagement)
Photos of yourself travelling or with teams with an interesting positive caption
Video content, this is not getting the same viewership numbers, but you get people watching your content for an extended period of time (high engagement), so great for product demos
Shy away from negative content, this does not work well on Linkedin. People are not interested in you complaining, they are however interested in solutions or thoughtful debate.
Don’t use any AI for writing posts. The posts that perform are the ones AI couldn’t write.
The posts that are personal, specific, uncomfortably honest do best. The ones that start with something that makes a stranger on the internet stop scrolling and think: this person is actually saying something real.
3. The sort of content Matt posts
“I never let my PR team have a say about my posts. They don’t even know what I’m about to throw out there – which annoys the hell out of them.”
He pauses. “But I can’t say things online that aren’t true. Because my existing team will call me out on it.”
1. Product announcements (but not the way most companies do them)
He doesn’t lead with the feature. He leads with the problem. Inconsistent service. Cash payments. A frustrating experience for guests. Then – here’s what we built to fix it. It’s a product launch written like a story, not a press release.
2. Strategic opinions
On remote work, AI, hotels and company culture. His real views, not press release language.
3. Honest leadership reflections
Like a colleague with AuADHD calling him out in front of 65 managers for not being explicit enough. Most CEOs would find that uncomfortable. Matt spent the whole week thinking about why it was a good thing, then posted about it publicly.
4. Personal stories
Candid, sometimes funny personal stories, like his husband walking in on him recording a podcast one weekend:
5. Personal identity posts
As a gay founder navigating the intersection of private life and public role.
The mix is deliberate. “Yes, I’m a gay founder, and that’s important to who I am – but if I’m always talking about my gayness, people will tune out. So I do that twice a year. The rest of the year I shy away from it.”
He also posts things that don’t always land. And he’s fine with that.
That captures something important about Matt’s approach. He’s not trying to be perfect. He’s trying to be real – and he’s constantly iterating on that.
“When I see just a text post and that first paragraph captures your attention – and it’s really personal, where something has upset them or made them think deeply – I open it up. But it is very rare.”
4. Vulnerability opens rooms
“I have to feel that I stand behind everything I put out there.”
What Matt has figured out through years of posting his honest views: vulnerability is a leadership tool.
“When I’m vulnerable, and I’m the first to open up, it allows others to do the same. At an offsite, I’m always the first to say – right, I’m an idiot, and this is the thing I did wrong that makes me an idiot. And suddenly that opens up the whole room. It transforms the way people feel.”
He sees that same dynamic on LinkedIn, at scale. “When I show vulnerability, managers see that. And hopefully they lead with the same vulnerability.”
He’s direct about who struggles with this most.
“Male founders – they talk about themselves, but they’re afraid of being seen as vulnerable. Afraid of being seen as a loser. Because they think you need to lead from strength, the way traditional CEOs back in the day used to.”
“But if you’re always the tough guy, everyone in the room is going to try to be the tough guy too. They’re not going to open up. You’re not going to share and fix the real issues in the company. When I show vulnerability, managers see that – and hopefully they lead with the same vulnerability too.”
Matt believes employees coming up now want something different. “They want to know who they’re working for more than what the brand represents. They want to know who the CEO is. Founder brand is much more important than company brand now – especially for employer branding.”
5. Planes, notes apps, no PR team
Matt keeps a running list of topics on his iPhone notes app. Topics accumulate. And whenever he gets on a flight he doesn’t buy the wifi, he opens the list instead and starts writing.
“When I’m on my computer, I’m drowning in content. But the moment I get on a short flight – I just write.”
The topic he starts with is rarely the topic he ends with. “By the end of the post, the topic is completely transformed from what I thought it was going to be about. As I start writing, I’m like – no, actually I feel differently about this. It’s a rabbit hole I go down.”
He writes to figure out what he really thinks. “The topics I put out there, I often haven’t verbalised internally at Mews. It’s me testing the waters. But once I’ve written it down, I’ve thought deeply about that topic for hours. Now I can confidently talk about it.”
The best ideas come when he’s offline and can’t act on anything else. A flight. A taxi. A hotel room. “When you just sit there for fifteen minutes, something that really bugs you comes up. Or when I’m in a hotel and they do something that frustrates me – great content.”
Matt posts 3–4 times a week. And says it gets addictive. “You do get addicted to the dopamine of likes and engagement. And the company now expects me to put things out there because it drives actual business results. Our podcast drives MQLs down our funnel.”
He also admits a dark side of that dependency. “Sometimes I run out of things to say, and I freak out. I go through a week thinking there must be a topic that inspires me – and nothing does. And I’ve learned to just be fine with not posting for 3–4 days too. But something always pops up.”
6. Why LinkedIn is the best (and last positive) social network
LinkedIn is Matt’s platform of choice. He believes it’s the only social network that has stayed consistently positive – and he thinks he knows why.
“It’s the only one where you have to identify who you are. Your name is there. Your job is there. Your employer can see you. So you’re not going to put shit out there (if you’re smart).”
So you’re not anonymous. You’re not hiding behind a handle.
The accountability is built into the structure. You’re a real person with a real job posting under your real name – which means the incentive to be decent, thoughtful, and constructive is baked in.
“That’s why engagement on LinkedIn generally is really positive.”
Matt adds that he blocks trolls, but that he’s only had to do that four or five times in his whole LinkedIn life.
7. The line between authenticity and oversharing
Matt is honest that he hasn’t always got this right.
“Like I said, in my personal life, I overshare. But on LinkedIn, I have to walk that line really carefully. I’ve made mistakes where I said things I was really uncomfortable with afterwards. But you just have to go through the learnings to understand what people respond badly to.”
His test for whether a post is worth the risk: if he gets nervous writing it, it’s probably a good post.
“When I feel a little bit nervous, I’m like – oh, this is going to be a good one. But I need to be very careful about how I put it out there, because it could land in completely the wrong way. I like being on that knife’s edge, because it pushes me to really think: is this just another flat post I could have written with AI, or is this something that actually changes the narrative?”
Matthijs Welle is the CEO and co-founder of Mews. Find him on LinkedIn – and if you want to see what authentic founder content actually looks like, read his posts.
🙋♂️ One more thing
My day job is as a co-writing partner / ghostwriter for founders. Founders and CEOs who want to show up on LinkedIn the way Matt does.
I have one opening coming up in June.
If you’re a founder who wants to tell your real story better, reply or DM me on LinkedIn.
Have a great week, and keep building 🙏
If you found this valuable, share it with a founder who needs to hear it – and consider subscribing if you haven’t already.
Until next time,
Dan 👋
Unpolished is underrated. When the person becomes legible, the brand follows — not the other way around. Most leaders spend years trying to communicate what they do before they understand who they are in the work.