Figure depicting a word cloud with few words, for example, business, relationships, bro, and so on represented in bold, and other words are presented in the lower fonts.

14Building a Personal Brand, BRO

Like all great loves in your life, when you look at your career and your company as a relationship, it won't feel like work to put the effort in. If you have ever seen Travis speak or conduct a workshop, he drills his point home humorously with his philosophy of Business Relationship Optimization. You need to optimize the relationships in your life.

Business Relationship Optimization

You become who you hang around. Travis realized while working on a couple of startups that he didn't have enough connections and business relationships outside of Kansas City. In 2007, Travis was working on a startup called AdiQus. The inspiration for the company was to create Advertising Intelligence. Ad IQ, get it?

Quite frankly, most ads suck. Both of us have a deep hatred for shitty advertising and marketing but Travis and his partners at the time decided to do something about it.

What about ads that could be targeted on hundreds of various parameters and geo-based? AdiQus was to be a cross between Gowalla and Groupon, neither of which existed yet. Partners Gary Jones, Joey Knight, and Travis had built quite a team in Kansas City. Kansas City has been historically conservative with its capital allocations. The Kauffman Entrepreneurial Foundation in Kansas City wasn't as accessible to the community then, as it is now. When Kansas City was chosen as Google Fiber's ...

Get Digital Sense now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.