Startup marketing: How Houston founders should approach their strategy

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In the startup world, marketing is not just lead generation. This Houston expert explains. Photo via Getty Images

Until recently, the concept of marketing within the startup sphere was often equated solely with lead-generation. It's not entirely inaccurate to say that "marketing is lead-generation," as revenue generation is undeniably the end goal of marketing efforts.

However, what tends to be overlooked by founders is the intricate path to achieving revenue generation and how marketing can pave the way. I firmly believe that a similar paradigm exists in the realm of B2C marketing.

Distinguishing "Marketing" from "marketing"

I'd like to start by establishing a distinction between Marketing and marketing. This distinction might not be perfect, but it encapsulates how I conceptualize these concepts. When I refer to Marketing with a capital "M," I'm alluding to the overarching strategies that companies employ to drive revenue through marketing and advertising activities. This is the domain of the chief marketing Officer. The role of a CMO entails overseeing marketing and advertising efforts to ensure their alignment and efficiency in achieving the company's broader strategic goals.

Given this concept, where should a startup begin when figuring out their marketing strategy?

The role of brand

There is a common tendency amongst startups to create a product, establish a name, and swiftly attempt to enter the market. While the initial step for a startup involves achieving product-market fit, I advocate that once this milestone is reached, startups should pause to invest time in crafting their brand identity. Branding serves as the facet of a company that sets it apart and defines itself. This encompasses articulating a vision, mission, and values. Founders have the opportunity to shape their company's voice, articulate how they add value to customers, and delineate the organizational culture they aspire to foster. This phase is pivotal because it establishes the foundational elements that necessitate internal alignment for efficient scalability.

Once the brand is established, it can be handed over to a skilled marketer to start driving revenue growth. However the path to revenue growth goes straight through brand awareness.

Distinguishing marketing from advertising

This distinction can be perplexing, as the activities described here largely fall under the Marketing umbrella. However, I find it beneficial to differentiate between marketing and advertising within the broader context of Marketing strategy. Marketing revolves around cultivating brand awareness. Marketing is about building brand awareness. In marketing campaigns the wording can be about the company and its team. While I don’t recommend the old visuals of people in a boardroom having meetings, it’s ok to talk about the people and goals of the company in marketing campaigns. What does your brand represent? What is your product? What do you do? Who are your people? What are your values? It’s ok to share all of these things, and depending on the channel a company is marketing on, their marketing person will be well equipped to display this.

Advertising has a different tone and purpose. When advertising a company is talking to their customer, and offering the customer a solution to their pain and problem. This is a company’s what. I assume that a company that has made it this far offers a solution that is a cure, and not a nice-to-have.

Most advertising campaigns follow a simple formula, “are you suffering from X?” with a clear answer of “our company can solve that with Y”. If the answer to the pain question is yes, there is a good probability that the person will click on the ad they are seeing. That probability improves when the advertising campaign is layered on top of a well executed brand awareness campaign.

The significance of brand awareness

Although I'm not a psychologist, I do recognize the potency of the subconscious mind. This isn't about psychological manipulation, but rather an acknowledgment that the subconscious retains more than the conscious mind is capable of. Unlocking this potential might be challenging for individuals, but for marketers, the process is comparatively more accessible. Present information to an individual, and as long as they see it, their subconscious mind will register and retain it. This underscores the importance of brand awareness in revenue generation. By exposing a target audience to the company’s messaging through brand awareness campaigns, enhances the likelihood of engagement.

This fundamentally reshapes how companies connect with their ICP.

The nuance of timing

When an individual encounters advertising, a part of their brain will recognize the brand and might even associate it positively. This underscores the criticality of brand awareness, as it allows companies to focus on their target audience and continuously engage them until they are ready to make a purchase. Determining the precise moment when a customer is ready to buy is nearly impossible. However, this moment invariably arises, usually propelled by a pain point. When that decisive moment arrives, the goal is for the company’s brand to be the first that comes to their mind or that they see. This necessitates an ongoing investment in brand awareness campaigns.

So what does this mean in the context of startups?

A capital-efficient marketing approach

A key component of any Marketing strategy is capital efficiency. Founders must familiarize themselves with crucial metrics, such as:

  1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): What is the expense of acquiring each customer?
  2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV or LTV): What is the anticipated revenue generated from engaging this customer?

While it's acceptable to commence with assumptions, any shifts in these assumptions warrant corresponding adjustments in a Marketing budget.

In the initial stages of a company’s lifecycle, a significant portion of sales might stem from direct, personalized selling efforts. This entails founders engaging in activities like providing software demos for enterprise sales or conducting face-to-face interactions within the target market. However, as revenue grows, capital is raised, and founders transition from selling to leading, this selling strategy should be phased out. This also marks the moment for founders to begin contemplating their Marketing budgets.

A starting point for figuring out your Marketing budget can be based on a CAC to LTV ratio of 1:3, where CAC is a third of your LTV. Once you have determined your CAC to LTV ratio, you need to determine what your revenue goal is, and then set your marketing budget based on that. Finally, you need to divide your Marketing budget between marketing and advertising activities. Depending on the stage the company is at, the division should be around 60% for marketing and 40% for advertising to start. This is to enable brand awareness to work its magic to build an audience for retargeting.

If you’re unsure about how to proceed, we can talk.

In the upcoming months, I intend to delve deeper into several topics:

  1. Founder-Led Storytelling
  2. The Imperative of Building Brand Awareness
  3. Delineating the Distinctions Between Marketing and Advertising and How They Synergize
  4. The Necessity of Outbound Email Marketing
  5. The Power of Marketing Email Automation in Nurturing Your Endeavors
  6. Embarking by Selling Your "What"

I hope these insights contribute value to the founder journey.

Should you have any questions I can help with, please don't hesitate to connect with me on LinkedIn.

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Yosef Levenstein is the chief marketing officer and venture partner at Golden Section Ventures.

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The music industry has adapted to the digital age — so should financial securities. Getty Images

The financial industry needs to digitize not tokenize, says this Houston expert

Guest column

One of my favorite movies growing up was Empire Records. It was the mid-1990s, and the closest we got to Instagram feeds was who had the best mixtapes. If you're not familiar with Empire Records (or what a mixtape is), I recommend watching the movie, but you don't have to worry too much about mixtapes any more.

Since Empire Records was released in 1995, the way we purchase and consume music has fundamentally changed. The physical music store was displaced by iTunes, and then the music industry evolved even further into a streaming economy. It took 24 years, but music evolved and it now operates in a fundamentally different way. Digitization of music was initially viewed as an existential threat to the industry, but in the end, music was digitized globally and the music industry very much survived.

The music industry has evolved and adapted to the digital age. The same happened across countless other industries, including financial services. Today we can invest in publicly traded stocks through a mobile app for free. However, a critical segment of capital markets has not evolved yet. The private securities space.

Transactions in private securities are still done on paper (no, DocuSign does not count as securities digitization.) Administrative costs are kept high due to the amount of paper that is processed and pushed through this system. As long as the foundation of private securities is paper, there is no amount of administrative technology out there to create an efficient market.

Public markets took the plunge into digital long before music did, and digitization of public markets enabled exponential growth globally. Trading volume, access to capital, and liquidity have all increased, and a large part of that can be attributed to the efficient and transparent nature of most public exchanges.

Efficient markets rely on price transparency and information equality. Currently, the private securities markets do not offer either of these characteristics. This is nothing new to people in the alternatives space, but how to reach these lofty goals, to create liquidity and reduce costs, is what I am excited about.

The reduction of cost does not relate only to commissions. There are administrative costs associated with private securities. Information distribution is slow and unilateral, forcing investors to depend on antiquated systems in order to track their investments. Nearly all of these costs are absorbed by the investor, and most efforts to date have not helped address the core issue, analog private security transactions.

Digitization of private securities is fundamentally different than tokenization. Tokenized securities are considered bearer securities. A digitized security, on the other hand, maintains its original status as a registered security, as long as its digitization is implemented in a manner that fits current regulatory requirements. Until recently, that had not been possible in a scalable way. Blockchain changed all of that.

Initial attempts at utilizing blockchain for private markets applied tokenization. Essentially, this configuration took securities that had clearly defined ownership records, anonymized them and put them on a public blockchain such as Ethereum. While there are some benefits to this approach, it also opened doors to significant fraud and securities regulation violations. Tokenization may provide liquidity, but the long-term risk far outweighs the value of liquidity for any prudent investor.

Blockchain does provide a framework that supports compliant digitization of private investments, it's simply not tokenization. The solution lies in using private permissioned blockchains that allow an appropriate degree of technical security while also ensuring transparency and accountability.

Blockchain enables us to maintain a statement of record that is both compliant, and scalable. Across the financial services industry, and across most other industries, blockchain is being deployed to help solve problems that were previously unmanageable. The blockchain is even helping farmers track their crops through IBM's blockchain. iownit has integrated blockchain at the core of our technology, proving that compliant digitization of private securities is possible and scalable.

The United States has a free market economy, so in the end, winners are determined by the market. It is our belief that the digitization of private securities is the responsible way to help this industry evolve. If you're still skeptical, just look at how the public securities markets have evolved since the '70s when electronic stock trading was enabled and the first digital public security trade was placed. Now try and imagine how private security markets will look in four years.

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Yosef Levenstein is the head of marketing at iownit, a Houston-based financial technology firm that is democratizing how investors and private companies transact.

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Houston residents rank economy as biggest problem, new Kinder survey shows

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The region’s economy tops the list of concerns of Houston-area residents surveyed by Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.

Respondents in the Kinder Houston Area Survey, which questioned nearly 9,000 residents of Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties, cite the regional economy as the area’s “biggest problem.”

Shrinking confidence in job opportunities and growing household financial pressures fueled the grim economic outlook:

  • The share of residents rating job prospects as “good” or “excellent” fell by more than 25 percentage points, the sharpest single-year decline since the 1980s.
  • Seventy-nine percent of those earning less than $25,000 said they’d be unable to cover an unplanned $400 expense. That was up from 72 percent last year. In the $50,000-to-$99,999 category, the figure was 39 percent, up from 30 percent last year.
  • More than 20 percent of residents said their financial status was worse than it was 12 months earlier.

“These challenges were particularly notable among lower- and middle-earning households,” according to a report about the survey.

Dan Potter, co-director of the institute’s Houston Population Research Center, says the annual survey “provides community leaders and the public with a map of where we’ve been on key issues, where we are now, and what’s of looming importance. It allows everyone to work together toward a better future for our city and our region.”

Houston-based Oxy officially announces CEO transition, names successor

Team Transition

Houston-based Occidental (Oxy) has officially announced its longtime CEO's retirement and her successor.

Oxy shared that Vicki Hollub will retire June 1. Reuters first reported Hollub's plan to retire in March, but a firm date had not been set. Hollub will remain on Oxy's board of directors.

Richard Jackson, who currently serves as Oxy's COO, will replace Hollub in the CEO role.

“It has been a privilege to lead Occidental and work alongside such a talented team for more than 40 years," Hollub shared in a news release. "Following the recently completed decade-long transformation of the company, we now have the best portfolio and the best technical expertise in Occidental’s history. With this strong foundation in place, a clear path forward and a leader like Richard, who has the experience and vision to elevate Occidental, now is the right time for this transition. “I look forward to supporting Richard and the Board through my continued role as a director.”

Hollub has held the top leadership position at Oxy since 2016 and has been with the energy giant for more than 40 years. Before being named CEO, she served as COO and senior executive vice president at the company. She led strategic acquisitions of Anadarko Petroleum in 2019 and CrownRock in 2024, and was the first woman selected to lead a major U.S. oil and gas company.

Hollub also played a key role in leading Oxy's future as a "carbon management company."

Jackson has been with Oxy since 2003. He has held numerous leadership positions, including president of U.S. onshore oil and gas, president of low carbon integrated technologies, general manager of the Permian Delaware Basin and enhanced oil recovery oil and gas, vice president of investor relations, and vice president of drilling Americas.

He was instrumental in launching Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, which focuses DAC, carbon sequestration and low-carbon fuels through businesses like 1PointFive, TerraLithium and others, according to the company. He also serves on the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative’s Climate Investment Board and the American Petroleum Institute’s Upstream Committee. He holds a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M University.

Jackson was named COO of Oxy in October 2025. In his new role as CEO, he will also join the board of directors, effective June 1.

“I am grateful to be appointed President and CEO of Occidental and excited about the opportunity to execute from the strong position and capabilities that we built under Vicki’s leadership,” Jackson added in the release. “It means a lot to me personally to be a part of our Occidental team. I am committed to delivering value from our significant and high-quality resource base. We have a tremendous opportunity to focus on organic improvement and execution to deliver meaningful value for our employees, shareholders and partners.”

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This article first appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

Rice Brain Institute awards seed grants for dementia, Alzheimer’s research

brain trust

The recently established Rice Brain Institute awarded 12 seed grants last month to support research on dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders.

The grants are part of the Rice DPRIT Seed Grant Program, which aims to help faculty members generate preliminary data, test and teams that would be supported under the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

The DPRIT was approved last year to provide $3 billion in state funding over a 10-year span for research on dementia prevention and other neurological conditions. It will be modeled after the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), which has awarded nearly $4 billion in grants since 2008.

“DPRIT is a historic initiative with transformative impact potential and at Rice we are very well equipped to contribute to its mission and help make Texas a leader in brain health and innovation,” Behnaam Aazhang, a Rice professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Neuroengineering Initiative and the RBI, said in a news release.

The Rice DPRIT Seed Grant Program is supported by the RBI and the Educational and Research Initiative for Collaborative Health (ENRICH) office at Rice. Most of the funding came from Rice's Office of Research, with a contribution from Rice's Amyloid Mechanism and Disease Center, which also launched last year.

A number of the teams include collaborators from Houston's Texas Medical Center, including Baylor College of Medicine, University of Texas Medical Branch and the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston.

The 12 teams are:

  • Keya Ghonasgi, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rice. Ghonasgi's research addresses the high risk of falls among people with different types of dementia and aims to develop a personalized, home-based fall-prevention approach using textile-integrated wearable sensors.
  • Luz Garcini, associate professor of psychological sciences at Rice, and Hannah Ballard, associate director of community and public health at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice. Garcini and Ballard's research looks at barriers and facilitators to early detection of Alzheimer’s disease in diverse, medically underserved urban communities and focuses on populations that experience late diagnosis, including Hispanic/Latino groups.
  • Lei Li, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, and Pablo Valdes, assistant professor of neurosurgery at UTMB. Li and Valdes' project develops a noninvasive, bedside imaging approach to monitor brain blood flow and oxygenation in patients recovering from stroke or brain surgery using photoacoustic imaging through a specialized transparent skull implant.
  • Cameron Glasscock, assistant professor of biosciences at Rice. Glasscock's project addresses repeat expansion disorders, such as Huntington’s disease and myotonic dystrophy, and focuses on stopping DNA instability before repeats reach a disease-causing threshold.
  • Raudel Avila, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rice. Avila's project focuses on everyday health factors such as nutrition, hydration and brain blood flow and how they influence brain aging long before symptoms of dementia appear.
  • Isaac Hilton, associate professor of bioengineering at Rice, and Laura Lavery, assistant professor of biosciences at Rice. Hilton and Lavery's project uses precise CRISPR-based gene regulation to target multiple genetic drivers of neuronal damage in Alzheimer’s.
  • Quanbing Mou, assistant professor of chemistry at Rice, and Qing-Long Miao, assistant professor of neurology at Baylor College of Medicine. Mou and Miao's project aims to develop a gene-regulation therapy for childhood absence epilepsy by restoring activity of the CACNA1A gene.
  • Momona Yamagami, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, and Christopher Fagundes, professor of psychological sciences at Rice. Yamagami and Fagundes' project addresses the physical and mental health challenges faced by spouses caring for partners with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias and aims to develop algorithms to determine the optimal timing and frequency of supportive text messages.
  • Han Xiao, professor of chemistry at Rice. Xiao's project aims to improve the delivery of antibody therapies to the brain using a noninvasive, light-based approach that temporarily opens the blood–brain barrier.
  • Lan Luan, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice. Luan's project investigates how tiny blood-vessel injuries in the brain, known as microinfarcts, contribute to dementia.
  • Natasha Kirienko, associate professor of biosciences at Rice. Kirienko's project targets a shared cause of neurodegeneration, impaired mitochondrial cleanup, and aims to identify an existing antidepressant that could be repurposed to protect neurons in diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
  • Harini Iyer, assistant professor of biosciences at Rice. Iyer's project will observe zebrafish to investigate how the brain’s primary immune cells become improperly activated in neurological disorders, leading to the loss of healthy neurons and cognitive impairment.

The RBI also named the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program in January. Read more about those projects here.

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