Successful Rule Breakers: Jason Barnard Of Kalicube On How To Succeed By Doing Things Differently

Published on Medium December 3, 2024 (Chad Silverstein)

In the world of business and within every industry, there are forward-thinking leaders who go against the status quo and find success. Their courage to take risks, embrace innovation, and inspire collaboration separates them from the competition. Until 2002, Apple’s famous slogan was “Think Different.” This attitude likely helped them become one of the most successful organizations in history. This interview series aims to showcase visionary leaders and their “status quo-breaking” approach to doing business. As part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jason Barnard.

Jason Barnard is an entrepreneur, author, keynote speaker, and CEO of Kalicube, a digital marketing agency based in France and the USA. He specializes in online brand management and is known for his superhero skills, which include his ability to reshape how Google and AI present brands online.

Why is this important, I hear you ask? Google and AI are defining how brands appear online — with or without their input.

Jason helps brands wrest control from the machines by building Knowledge Panels with the “Wow” factor to reach the right people, stand out in a crowded market, control their narrative, and win more business. This isn’t just optimization; it’s a strategic manipulation of digital perceptions. He’s been working on Google since the year it was incorporated, and he has been successfully manipulating Google from day one.

Google said they “… don’t know anyone externally who has as much insight into how [Knowledge Panels] work.”

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us your “Origin Story”? Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?

I had a very lonely childhood on a farm in the North Yorkshire Moors in England. The nearest neighbor was a mile away, and the nearest transport a three-mile walk. So, there was always a sense of isolation and loneliness, which was exacerbated when my mother left home when I was four years old. This left my father to raise my two older sisters and me singlehandedly. I greatly respect my father, who raised a young family while building his own career. But that meant his parental availability was limited for all of us. Like me, my sisters were small children, and I spent most of my childhood alone.

But this forged my personality. Those feelings of abandonment and isolation motivated me to become hyper-independent! I found innumerable ways to entertain myself by creating challenges through solo games, ambitious goals, and building things from nothing. And I taught myself to have a patient reliance on my own motivation — a motivation to build without support, the imagination to see a goal others cannot see, and the patience to get there with micro steps.

In short, that isolation I experienced throughout my childhood forged the self-reliance that has been key to my entrepreneurial journey in adulthood.