TSG Office Hours Episode 12 - Anti Logo Slap with Alex Ebanks

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The room you wish you were already in.

In this episode, founder Thabiti Stephens sits down with Alex Ebanks, a corporate communications leader with an extensive background at brands including Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Essence Ventures, for a conversation on career navigation, partnerships, and the real work behind storytelling.

Alex's career philosophy starts with reputation: excel at the tasks other people avoid, and long-term relationships will do more for your career than any job application ever will. She's specific about where influence actually lives inside an organization — build relationships with everyone, especially executive assistants, who often hold more real information and access than their titles suggest.

On corporate partnerships, her advice is tactical: research a company's fiscal year cycle so your pitch lands during actual budget planning, and chase shared value instead of what she calls "anti-logo slap" — partnerships built on real alignment, not just a logo on a banner. She points founders toward a company's existing community partners or industry associations as the fastest way to show you already fit their priorities.

The conversation's throughline is storytelling — Alex argues human connection still matters most, even in an AI-saturated landscape, and that founder-led storytelling works because people anchor to a face and an origin story, not just a product. For founders without big budgets, her advice is to use free tools like social media to build authentic momentum instead of waiting for a bigger platform. She closes with hard-earned lessons from the communications seat: strong writing is still non-negotiable no matter how good AI tools get, bad news should be flagged early so there's time to solve it together, and pushing back on leadership only works when it's solution-oriented and grounded in data, not preference.

If you've ever wanted a seat at the table where the real advice gets shared, this is where it continues.

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