Stop Building a Personal Brand | Ayoub Fandi on Becoming Known for Your Work

We hear the advice to build a personal brand all the time, and everyone wants to know the how. But Ayoub Fandi is a walking, (pretty) compelling argument that you might be asking the wrong question.

Ayoub went from working relatively quietly in GRC to becoming one of the people most closely associated with GRC Engineering, building an audience of tens of thousands, relationships with security leaders and founders across the industry, and a career where opportunities increasingly started finding him instead of the other way around. In this episode of Random Access Memories, Ayoub joins Jake Bernardes to unpack how that actually happened, and refreshingly, there was no master plan to become an influencer. He started writing because writing forced him to understand what he actually thought, chose a very specific niche, kept showing up long after consistency stopped being exciting, and used the audience he built as a doorway to real relationships rather than treating follower count as the goal.

We get into Ayoub’s surprisingly sophisticated content engine, why the people behind his ideas matter more than the content itself, how to find an unfair advantage that actually fits who you are, and why “follow your passion” might actually be terrible career advice.

Ayoub’s alternative is much more useful: passion often follows competence, but you have to stay with something long enough to become good before you can know whether you actually care about it. Most importantly, Ayoub makes the distinction between becoming visible and becoming valuable. Influence can create leverage, but the point is deciding what you want that leverage to be for.

In this episode Why writing publicly can make you better at your actual job How Ayoub became synonymous with GRC Engineering Why consistency mattered more than trying to manufacture virality The content system behind hundreds of ideas and more than a thousand posts Why your audience should become relationships, not just followers How to “niche down twice” until people associate one thing with you Finding and exploiting your genuine unfair advantages Why passion often follows competence instead of preceding it What visibility, influence, and access are actually useful for Why knowing your personal “why” matters before you start chasing reach