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Folklore’s Founder Hired His Own CEO. Twice.
Mike Matheny knows where his strengths stop. Obele Brown-West read all 300 pages to learn where Folklore's begin
Mike Matheny cleans the office with his son. He also leads UX on client work, makes staffing calls and, twice now, has hired someone else to be CEO of the agency he founded.
The newest is Obele Brown-West, CEO + Partner at Folklore, the Minneapolis independent brand and digital experience agency. She succeeds Lorenz Esguerra, who took the job from Matheny in 2024 and now moves to chairman.
Handing over the top job once is rare. Matheny, Folklore’s Founding Partner + Chief Operating Officer, has done it twice, and he’s plain about why.
“I also like to think I’m a little self-aware, and I know where my strengths are and where they’re not for sure,” he says.
That candor sold Brown-West. After more than 20 years in the business, with stops at Weber Shandwick, Tinuiti, Tracer and Colle McVoy, she says few founders are “as self-aware as he is.” It made the job easy to want.
Obele Brown-West, CEO + Partner, Folklore
Mike Matheny, Founding Partner + Chief Operating Officer, Folklore
Four guys, a card table and one hat too many
“We were four guys at a card table when we started,” Matheny says.
His background is UX and customer experience, and he still does the work. He takes what strategy hands him, shapes the experience and sits with developers to understand the technology. The trouble starts when the lead UXer in the room also holds the CEO title.
“It’s pretty hard for the head client to call and complain to the UXer they’ve seen over and over as the CEO,” he says. “I’m sitting in a meeting and they’re complaining about the SOW and overage, and I am trying to show a wireframe.”
That’s hard on the business, Matheny says, and unfair to the client. Folklore tried the obvious fix — hire another UXer to take over for him — and it didn’t stick.
So he went the other way and hired for the top job. “They have to have the time dedicated to it,” he says of the role.
Esguerra arrived first: someone who knew people, could spend time on the culture and had deep ties in the community. “Lorenz was what we needed at the time,” Matheny says. Brown-West, he believes, is what Folklore needs now.
A decade of trading notes, then no interview
Brown-West and Esguerra have known each other for a decade. They worked together at Weber Shandwick, where he oversaw the Minneapolis office and she oversaw the digital group for the Americas. After both moved on, they kept calling each other for advice.
Once Esguerra got to Folklore, his requests grew. Would she keep advising the agency over the longer term? Would she meet Matheny?
She did. By then Matheny had run into her several times at The BrandLab, the Minneapolis nonprofit where Esguerra has deep ties. What followed was six to eight months of conversation about the industry, where it was headed and what Folklore could become.
“I never interviewed,” Brown-West says.
She had other plans, too. “Mike will tell you, I didn’t think I was coming to Folklore. I thought I was going to go do something totally different.”
Matheny has a word for what those talks became: springboarding. “It’s not a matter of whose idea it was,” he says. “It’s that the ideas can get better and better.”
300 pages out, 200 conversations back
Somewhere in those months, Brown-West noticed a gap. The Folklore she heard about in conversation was a different agency from the one she knew as an outsider. So she asked Matheny to send some work and thought leadership.
She expected about 30 pages.
“It was 300,” she says.
Matheny’s defense: “I’m not a great word person. I’m a UX guy.”
The file came with a warning — “Don’t try to download this on your phone. It ain’t gonna work” — and it still wasn’t the whole library.
A deck that size is either a warning or an invitation. Brown-West took it as an invitation. She had ChatGPT and Claude take a first pass, was surprised by what both pulled out, then read the whole thing front to back a couple of times.
She came back with ideas, many of them about AI, and questions about why Folklore positioned itself one way when the work said another. Word got around that her reply ran 200 pages.
“I don’t know that it was quite 200, but it led to probably 200 conversations,” Brown-West says.
She said agencies were all the same. Then she looked again
In 2023, Brown-West left the agency business for Tracer, a marketing technology platform. She was vocal on the way out: agencies were all the same.
“What I realized was that that wasn’t true,” she says. “I’ll be honest, it wasn’t true.”
From Tracer, outside the business but adjacent to it, she saw room for agencies doing “interesting and sharp work on a smaller scale.” The problem had been distance.
At Weber Shandwick, her remit grew from Chicago to the Midwest to the Americas. Tinuiti exploded while she was there.
“As we grew rapidly at Tinuiti, I got farther and farther away from the work,” she says.
So the search narrowed to one question: where could she lead and stay close to the work? She wanted an agency where she could be “involved and ingrained and entrenched.” That was the test she ran on Folklore, one conversation at a time.
Zero to 60, then a massive QA check
Matheny has watched a new tool rattle the industry before. He studied graphic design at Iowa State, spent time in a program in Basel and did layouts by hand: cut, paste down, photocopy. Then the computer showed up.
“It was another tool at the end. It didn’t destroy everything,” he says. “We all lived through Y2K, right?”
He expects AI’s impact to be larger, and he’s specific about where it helps today. When he needs to go 100 miles an hour, he says, “it gets me from zero to 60.”
The rest is strategy and judgment. And checking.
“You need to build a massive QA check on this thing,” Matheny says.
Folklore’s clients include health and medical device companies, where a hallucination becomes a legal matter. He won’t let AI crawl a live site for them. He has let it run all the way into a CMS for SEO work — “holy cow, what it did” — but “these are businesses that still have to function and bring in revenue.”
Add security, personal information and the new insurance policies Folklore now pays for. Inside the agency, operations and processes are heavily automated, and Matheny keeps the label honest.
“That’s just automation,” he says.
He also doesn’t believe AI replaces junior talent. The people who grow up on it, he says, should get the most out of it.
Brown-West hears the same tension from brands: excited and skittish at once. They own stacks of legacy technology that were supposed to help them think, produce and create, and “none of them talk to each other.” Now comes a mandate to add one more thing.
“I think there’s a lot of paralysis because of that,” she says. It’s the source, in her words, of “a little bit of agita” across the industry.
The question brands keep asking is how AI fits into what they already have, without ripping things out. Brown-West is bullish that Folklore belongs in that conversation, helping brands understand their customers and build experiences where the technologies talk to each other.
The smartest CMOs are making friends down the hall
Asked what the smartest CMOs are quietly doing that everyone else will copy in a year, the two partners split the C-suite between them.
Brown-West took finance. The smartest CMOs she knows are getting fluent in what their CFOs care about.
“I think the smartest CMOs are also probably very good CFOs at this point,” she says.
Matheny took technology. “The smartest ones are making friends with their CTOs because too many times I’ve watched marketing and technology fight,” he says.
Folklore gets hired through one door or the other, the CMO’s or the CTO’s, and can feel the friction when it meets the other side. Its stance is agnostic: find the solution that bridges the two.
When that happens, Matheny says, “it’s just like someone with great ideas that all of a sudden has all the power of an enterprise system.”
Finance on one side, technology on the other, the customer in the middle. Folklore’s founder would recognize the arrangement.
As for the agency’s next chapter, Brown-West is keeping the details close for now. “We’re excited to tell you what’s next in a little bit,” she says.
Matheny found the right CEO, twice. He’s back at his wireframes.
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