Pathfinder CITADEL’s Cohort 2 moves into Session 7, focused on branding, storytelling for investors, and media readiness, led by Zeeshan Qedwaee, co-founder of Studio A Collective. The session follows a run of curriculum sessions that have progressively built founders’ capacity across networking, pitching, and legal preparedness, and this installment shifts attention toward how founders present themselves and their ventures once the underlying business fundamentals are already in place, treating narrative and public presence as a discipline distinct from the substance of the business itself. Positioning this session near the later stage of the cohort’s curriculum suggests a deliberate sequencing, one that assumes founders have already spent enough time refining their business model and legal footing to now focus on how that work gets communicated to the outside world.
Qedwaee brings a background that blends enterprise and commercial strategy with creative practice, having built Studio A Collective around connecting creative talent with market opportunities and helping translate artistic and narrative skill into commercial outcomes. That dual perspective positions him to guide founders through the often uncomfortable territory where a genuinely strong business can still fail to land with investors or media simply because its story is poorly constructed or inconsistently communicated, a gap many technically capable founders struggle to close on their own. Founders with strong technical backgrounds in particular often underestimate how much a coherent narrative shapes early investor impressions, treating storytelling as a soft skill rather than a functional part of fundraising and market positioning.
The session will guide founders on how to build a compelling brand narrative, communicate their story with clarity, and position their ventures more effectively in front of investors, media, and other key stakeholders, treating each audience as requiring a distinct framing rather than a single generic pitch repeated verbatim. Founders will also work through media engagement and public relations strategy, areas that startups frequently neglect until they need press coverage urgently, by which point building credibility with journalists and media contacts from scratch under time pressure is considerably harder than developing those relationships early and deliberately. The session’s framing implies that media readiness is not something to assemble reactively once a press opportunity appears, but a capacity founders should build well before they actually need it.
Public speaking and presenting a startup’s vision with confidence and purpose round out the session, addressing a skill that many founders treat as secondary to product and business model work despite its outsized influence on how investors and partners perceive a venture’s leadership. Organizers describe the session as a practical learning experience designed to help founders turn strong ideas into stories that resonate, reflecting an understanding that resonance, not just accuracy, is what ultimately moves investors and media audiences to act. Session 7 is scheduled for Thursday, September 10, 2026, from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM, continuing Pathfinder CITADEL’s broader Cohort 2 curriculum alongside its recent institutional partnership with CMOontheGO covering strategic marketing and international positioning across verticals including Career JumpStart Institute and Escape Velocity Accelerator.
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