A single idea can open in countless directions. Points of View is a series gathering perspectives around a concept, with each participant choosing their own journey through questions, answers, and the imagination and marvels in between.
This edition explores leverage — including what it looks like to harness it vs. building your own — and how leverage takes shape across systems, relationships, and ideas to create effects that compound over time.
Here, we spoke to Mostafa ElBermawy, founder and CEO of NoGood, a growth marketing consultancy, and Goodie AI, a platform focused on brand visibility across AI search and conversational systems. As a growth engineer and venture builder, he works with companies like Procter & Gamble and ByteDance to help navigate changes in how people discover, evaluate, and choose products.
In this conversation, he shares how founders can find leverage in the connective tissue others miss, build from knowledge earned through proximity, and distinguish lasting advantage from borrowed momentum.
What makes something have lasting, compounding leverage, and not just a temporary advantage?
Temporary advantage usually comes from being early to a tactic: a new channel, a clever prompt, a platform loophole. It works until everyone catches on, and then it’s just table stakes; an edge that only holds while the system sits still is borrowed time. And nothing sits still right now.
Lasting leverage comes from owning something people can’t just go buy, and wiring it so it gets stronger the more you use it.
Where does non-obvious leverage tend to hide?
Three places, mostly: distribution, the gaps between functions, and the boring work nobody wants to own. A lot of the biggest moves in tech are distribution plays wearing a product costume. Google paid Apple $20 billion a year to be the default search on the iPhone. Not to be better — to be default. ChatGPT ran the same play with Apple years later.
The sneakier spot is between functions. In AI search, what used to be “brand” and what used to be “technical SEO” are turning into one system. Your narrative, content, earned media, product data, reviews, schema, community — they’re all inputs into how a model understands you and whether it recommends you. The leverage sits in that connective tissue.
And some of it hides in plain, boring sight: clean data, naming conventions, the plumbing and context that make everything downstream faster.
Amplification makes something louder. Leverage makes it work better.
What do people mistake for leverage that isn’t it?
Amplification. Amplification makes something louder. Leverage makes it work better. They look identical right up until you scale a weak idea and realize all you’ve done is help more people notice it’s weak. Real leverage usually starts with subtraction. Cut the vague language. Kill the low-signal campaign. Fix the thing causing the confusion before you spend a dollar spreading the message wider.
How does proximity to a problem change the kind of leverage you can create?
There’s a line from [Y Combinator co-founder] Paul Graham I think about often: Live in the future, then build what’s missing. You don’t reason your way to the best ideas. You notice them, because you’re standing somewhere most people haven’t reached yet.
That’s how Goodie started. We were feeling the shift before we had language for it. Buyers had stopped clicking blue links and started asking AI systems for comparisons, recommendations, and purchasing advice. A new distribution layer was forming and brands had no control plane for it. I wasn’t reading that in a report. I was watching it break across the brands we work with every day.
Proximity gives you knowledge that can’t be copied, because it’s earned, not researched. It tells you which problems are real and urgent versus which ones just sound good in a deck.
What responsibility comes with having an edge that others don’t?
There’s a real class divide forming between people working at the frontier of AI and people locked out of it. I’ve sat across from talented people who left big-name companies for one reason: they wanted the tools they needed to keep growing, and their company wouldn’t let them near them. That gap compounds, in money and in career, and it’s going to decide a lot of futures over the next few years.
When you’re ahead, you can guard the edge or you can teach it. I teach mine. Through writing, through [a] masterclass, through putting our research out in the open. Part of it is simple: a higher bar lifts everyone. But honestly, the bigger reason is that an edge you’re scared to share was probably never that deep to begin with. The deepest moat is the one you’re still digging.
